Football Helmet Cakes

The boys are into football this year. They love to play the game after church with a bunch of kids and especially at home with Daddy. They also started collecting football cards and trade with each other. While they each collect everyone's favorite team -- the Packers, they each decided on various teams to collect. They can sit for an hour or more looking over their cards, rearranging them, trading them, and whatever else you can do with cards. And so, when I saw a football helmet cake pan knew that would be a perfect cake for Pete, Re-Pete, and Tank for their birthdays this year and they agreed.

Because I had three cakes to do I did plan ahead and baked each cake in advance and then wrapped and froze them right up until I was ready to decorate them. Of course each boy wanted a different flavor. Pete has his standard carrot which is always a favorite. Re-Pete chose my absolute favorite -- chocolate cake, and Tank wanting to be different out of the blue decided on lemon which was strange being that I never make any white/yellow cakes. That is one I still need to perfect. Anyway, while they all liked the Packers none of them wanted the same cake so it was decided that Re-Pete would get the Packer helmet while the other two selected their second-favorite team.

The only problems I had were with tinting the frosting. I try to avoid using a lot of food coloring but as it turns out to get a true red you need a lot, and I mean a lot of red coloring. Oh well, it is only a few times a year. The second problem I had was when I was going to tint the frosting for the Packer helmet. For some reason I had green in my head and put a dollop of green in the frosting and no sooner had I done that but it clicked that the helmet should be gold! Ahh! I tried in vain to turn that green frosting yellow but it ended up a "Shrek green" as my Mom said. I was bummed being that this was my favorite cooked frosting and takes a bit of time to make in addition to wasting butter! But, my Mom assisted in that and started the frosting for me. Now, what to make with my extra frosting.

As it turned out, the boys (George, Pete and Re-Pete) assisted with decorating the cakes by pipping on the frosting. I was happy to oblige as then I really only did one entire cake myself. I decided to forgo even attempting to pipe on the logos and instead printed them out, covered them with plastic and put them on at the end. Much easier! These were fun though. Look for another football related cake in July!

[caption id="attachment_782609" align="aligncenter" width="360" caption="Pete's cake"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_782610" align="aligncenter" width="360" caption="Re-Pete's cake"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_782611" align="aligncenter" width="360" caption="Tank's cake"][/caption]