Superbowl Cake

I was having some serious issues trying to figure out what to make for the Superbowl.  Bryon suggested a cake shaped like a football.  I decided that it should obviously be a layer cake but then was having an issue deciding on complimentary layers and filling/frosting etc.  I had some frozen buttercream that needed to be used, so that was a given.  Eventually I decided to make all layers out of the same thing:  chocolate velvet.   I used a recipe I had previously used for cupcakes (Mom gave me the recipe!  Good call Ma ;D ) and made an 8" triple layer cake.

For the filling, I decided on raspberry buttercream, based on a recipe in a cookbook Dad gave me this Christmas!  Delicious, for serious.  Thanks Dad!

So I made cakes the night before, and they took FOREVER to bake.  The edges ended up a little toasted, but it was ok since I had to trim them off anyway because the cake pans I was using had scalloped edging and I didn't want that.  The next day I defrosted the frozen buttercream and made the new batch of raspberry buttercream...so easy!

Finally, I stacked it all up, and this is when the football-shaped plan broke down.  I was going to have Bryon cut it into a football for me, but I was picturing this:

and he was picturing this:

but the size of the cake didn't really permit either.  So we left it as was and frosted it as usual.  I did a crumb coating which did beautiful things for the final look.  I wanted to decorate it with a football, but I couldn't get the icing brown!  It kept turning this awful grey color.  I recruited Bryon to help try to make it brown, but he managed to make a different color of grey...oh well.  Instead, I decorated it with red and blue, the colors of both the Giants and Patriots, but white plus red or blue makes pink/baby blue, so the cake looked like it was celebrating the birth of football and the gender wasn't clear, rather than being team colors.  Oh well.  It was the most adorable football cake ever.  Here's a picture, compliments of Loki.

 

The cake was ridiculously rich, which I wasn't really expecting.  I could barely finish my slice.  It went over well though, and some people even went back from seconds.  I haven't asked yet for many specific notes on how to improve the cake, but it garnered many compliments, so I'm thinking this is one worth redoing on occasion!!  Woot!  The one thing Laura suggested was making the cake more chocolatey.  It had a light chocolate flavor instead of a super rich one.  I don't know that I would have wanted a chocolatier taste considering how intense all the other flavors were, but it's worth a try.  Damon said he didn't think the raspberry center went with the rest of the cake, but others really liked it.  Sooo, I'm not sure what to do about that.  Here's a picture of a cross section, again compliments of Loki.

PS- Yay the Giants won!! :)

Next, I'll be making cake balls, sans recipe, with the leftover bits of chocolate velvet cake that I had to trim off to level and even up the cakes and the two flavors of buttercream icing.  I'm planning to cover them in milk chocolate!  Hope they are as nomnom-y as I'm imagining.