stadium cake

I love to make my kids birthday cakes. I give them a few days to think over what kind of cake they want and then I think through how I'm going to make it. I love to try new things and I love a good challenge. So when Micah told me that he wanted a baseball cake "but not just the ball, the kind with dirt" I knew that a field wouldn't be too difficult and I thought it would be fun. Then the night before his birthday I was thinking more and more about the field and I thought, I could make this even better. I will not only make him a field I will make him a stadium. I thought about what pans to use and how to shape the cake just so...and this is what I came up with. Please remember I'm a mother with four kids not a professional cake decorator. So is this perfect? no. But I LOVE how it turned out and I'm proud that this is my first original creation!! I loved that when Greg looked at the cake and said "is this from pinterest?" I could say "NO. I thought this one up on my own" That's not to say that someone else hasn't made a cake like this it's just saying that I didn't have a tutorial to look at or any photos of stadium cakes filling my head when I made this. That's probably why I like it so much, I don't have the perfect pinterest picture to compare it to!!

Here's how I did it. I bake my homemade chocolate cake (Betty Crocker) in two 9inch round pans. I then frosted the bottom layer with green homemade butter frosting (Betty Crocker). I took the top layer and cut a big chunk out of the middle by holding my knife at an angle to get the "stadium seat" feel.

Then I just put the top layer on and covered up the green frosting with parchment paper. Don't forget to put a little parchment paper on your serving plate too so that the frosting doesn't get on it.

I frosted the top layer and sides with white frosting and then added sprinkles to be the crowd. Then I took some parchment paper and cut out the shape of the dirt so that I could add some crushed graham crackers to be the dirt. At this point the green frosting was getting a little hard so I had to "break up" the top part in order to get it sticky again. Then I put the graham cracker crumbs down and carefully peeled the parchment paper off.

I frosted the sides a little more and tried to make it as smooth as possible. I could have added more detail but I really wanted the focus to be on the field since that it was Micah requested in the first place. I also added some flags and a "welcome to Micah Stadium" sign! Micah loved his cake and we all enjoyed eating it as well. Here's an obscene amount of photos of the cake...can't help myself!