Super Bowl Stadium Cake

I'm from Colorado, and I admit it: I'm a total fair-weather Broncos fan. When they're doing well I'm really into it, but when they're losing I'm on Pinterest while everyone else screams at the TV. But, when they won the AFC Championship in January, you can bet that we were planning a Super Bowl party as soon as the score went to "Final." The request was for me to "make something Pinterest-inspired, because she likes that."

A little intimidating, right? But hey, I'm up for a challenge. So I hopped onto my favorite site (sorry, Netflix) and searched for anything Super Bowl related. I finally stumbled across this original post at Coolest Birthday Cakes. I thought, "sure, that's a cinch! Totally easy." Yeah, those words would come back to haunt me. 

The Process:

So if you look at the original post, you can see that there's some instruction, but very little. My original plan was to dye the cake batter orange and blue for a Broncos theme, which I did. Unfortunately, it took forever and a day to get the orange just right. It would have been soooooo much easier had the Broncos' colors been blue and peach. But possibly that's less intimidating? I digress. Because it took about 6000 drops of gel coloring, I beat the batter too much and the cake barely rose. 

Long story long, that cake ended up going into a blue and orange (at least it was orange!) trifle that I took to church. And that left me with exactly no back-up cakes. Since I bemoaned the lack of instructions on the original post, here are the first steps that I took. If you have a better way of doing things, please comment and let me know!

1. Grease and flour the heck out of two 9x13 pans, making sure they have straight edges (instead of slanted).
2. Bake two cakes, praying feverishly that both turn out okay.
3. Do a little happy dance when both cakes turn out just fine (well, even!)
4. Flip them over and line the pan with a little plastic wrap, then freeze the cakes for at least 6 hours.
5. Cut one of the cake into thirds, length-wise.
6. Re-freeze the thirds to make sure they'll be fine.
7. Put the two end pieces on either side of the 9x13 and do a light crumb coating in between/around to make sure everything sticks together well. The middle cake will be your playing field, and the sides will be your stadium.
8. Cut the middle third on a diagonal, making two triangular-shaped pieces. Hint: if you're like me and are too worked up to do this by yourself because it's 11:30pm the night before the Super Bowl and you have no backup cakes and no time to fix it if something goes wrong, have your dad do this. 
9. Quickly flip the triangular pieces on top of the two sides, making sure both pieces are facing the field at a 45-degree angle (woohoo, I just used geometry in real life!).
10. Do another crumb coating on top of the whole cake.

Okay, so that's the assembly part. And yes, I am a dramatic person, especially when I'm baking late at night. But here's the part I haven't told you yet - this was also my first foray into fondant. Which I (stupidly) thought would be easy. Not so much! Anyways, I followed this recipe from Cute DIY Projects and to be fair to them, when I say I "followed it" I mean "looked at it briefly and ignored all their hints." Anyways, I made a little green fondant and a little white fondant. It all ended up working out.

So the next day (Super Bowl Sunday!) I frosted the whole cake pretty well, then rolled out the green fondant to the size of the field cake. I put it on and got it... well... mostly smooth. 85%. Still counts. Then I rolled out the white fondant into small strips the size of the stadium stands, and put a little bit of buttercream on top. Then I sprinkled about 8000 (rough estimate) multicolored sprinkles on it to look like fans. It helped give me that really square look that I wanted for the stands, so that was nice. The fondant stretched a bit when I put it on, but I think it was still easier than trying to get the sprinkles on in a square a different way. With time running out before we had to leave, I quickly rolled tiny strings of white fondant to be the yard lines. Perfect? Heck no. Worked? Yeah, mostly. After piping around the sides I declared it good enough and setted in to watch the Broncos win the Super Bowl. Woohoo!

The Result:

Not gonna lie, I got a lot of "ooohs" and "ahhhhs" when I took it out of the box. Everybody seemed to really like it, and when we put the little figurines on top (that we already had) it seemed to complete the look. Most people that commented said "I can't believe you made this, I thought it came from a store!" Still trying to decide if that's actually a compliment, but I'm going to take it as such.

And there you have it: the actual process of making a really time-consuming stadium cake. I wish I had done some things differently (the yard lines bother me a bit, and the fact that neither team name is in the end zone), but for the most part I was happy with it. I'm not the world's best cake-decorator, so I think this is helping my "skills." I'm still pretty happy with the result - looking forward to next year's game!