Ball Pit Birthday Cake

I've been asked quite a lot who made the cake and then HOW I made the cake so I thought I would post in detail how I achieved Kallum's Ball Pit Cake.  I took photos and posted them on facebook so I have each stage of the construction. Hope you find it inspiring.

I started a little backwards, as we live in the tropics making icing while a cake is baking away is not ideal so I made the buttercreeam icing a day in advance and coloured it up using my new AmeriColor gels which I got from The Raspberry Butterfly.

AmeriColor Gels

I think you will agree getting these colours was a great decision as I don't think I could have acheived these vibrant colours any other way and still retained the quality of the buttercream.

How great are these colours?

I actually had two bites of the cherry as it were, I had organised a Cake Smash photo shoot to celebrate Kallum's first birthday and I wanted the cake that he smashed to be the same as the one for his party. As this cake was being made to be "smashed" and not eaten I bought a unfilled sponge from Woolworths to use for the base cake. I could only get a square one so got a little creative in making the circle (can you tell?). The top layer had an inner circle removed to basically get the "pit" shape.

Base cake with crumb layer of icing

This was put in the fridge overnight to help with the final icing the next day. Humidity is NOT my friend while trying to decorate a cake.

Ok, so with the base under control ... onto the balls. I baked a double quantity of cupcakes and used two different sized silicon trays. I didn't use papers as I wanted a smooth finish so I made sure I prepared them with butter and flour so they definately didn't stick. Once cooled I trimmed into spheres, I found the larger ones (red) worked better as I didn't have to join two smaller cakes together.

Blue is a Breville one and Red is from KMart

Here are the cupcakes trimmed into balls ...

Not really round are they?

This cake creates alot of off cuts which are perfect for creating some cake pops to match your cake. If you don't know what I am talking about head on over to Bakerella and check out her awsome creations!

So now I have all the elements, onto the messy stuff.

Base cake with icing
this did need another coating after a bit of chilling in the fridge.

The first balls

The completed cake,
straight into the fridge before the icing falls off.

Completed cake prior to being put in the fridge ...
as you can see from the glossy icing it was all starting to melt away.

 Icing the balls was very tricky and messy given the icing kept sliding off due to the humidity. I was really worried about it but after being in the fridge overnight I was able to re-touch little areas and the cake looked great.

Looks much better when shot by a professional.

And what I did differently for the second time .....

No store bought cakes this time around! I made two double quantity buttercakes this time around. The first I actually coloured a pale blue as I wanted a bit of an "ahh' moment when the cake was cut. Plans changed after baking, my blue cake was a bit on the slim side and when the second one came out it was clear this had to be the base cake, not sure how I managed such different results but my knob turning son may have had a hand in it or perhaps I didn't beat it enough.

So to make the balls this time around I just trimmed all the brown edges off the blue cake (as they actually looked a sickly green) and then crumbled in the food processor, added frosting to bind and then rolled into balls. The balls this time around were definately a better shape.

Instead of icing with buttercream I actually dipped these balls in coloured chocolate as the filling was very sweet and I was concerned about being the overall taste being a sugar overload.

Now if the cake above looks a little worse for wear you are right. It turns out that my darling husband smashed into my sweet table and sent the cake tumbling. I found a couple of balls in the bin and you can see the base has shifted and clearly rubbed up against something.

Luckily for me (and him) I was deep in conversation and my mum re-assembled the cake without me ever seeing how bad it was. Sadly I never got a good close up shot before the damage but I'm sure you can use your imagination.