Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: Liam Turns Nine

My friend Dorothy's younger son Liam just turned nine and he was open to any type and design of cake for his birthday. But he did mention chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting and Dorothy suggested a soccer theme. I immediately thought of the Oopsy Daisy Cake from Baked Elements, an amazing milk chocolate cake with peanut butter filling and vanilla-peanut butter frosting that I've made a few times before. But I needed a larger cake for Liam's party and I didn't want to take a chance on scaling up the cake recipe because it doesn't include weight measurements. Instead I took the filling and frosting components of the Oopsy Daisy cake (which are much easier to scale up compared to the cake) and combined them with two 9-inch by 13-inch chocolate cake layers I baked using Rose Levy Beranbaum's always reliable chocolate butter cake recipe from The Cake Bible. I covered the cake in rolled fondant and added some fondant grass around the sides. 
Liam's older brother Alexander won't eat chocolate cake, so I made the soccer ball out of vanilla cake (using Rose Levy Beranbaum's white butter cake recipe and a Fat Daddios 6-inch hemisphere pan). I frosted it and covered it in fondant pieces, doing the best I could to approximate a soccer ball. The final touch was some soccer ball candles that I had left over from Alexander's soccer-themed birthday party four years ago. I was really pleased with the way the cake came out and Liam loved it!

Recipes: "Base Formula for Butter Cake (Chocolate)," "Base Formula for White Butter Cake," and "Classic Rolled Fondant" from The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum; Peanut Butter Filling and Vanilla Peanut Butter Frosting components of the "Oopsy Daisy Cake" from Baked Elements: Our 10 Favorite Recipes, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.

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