In honor of the start of Baseball Season I dug up this Angel’s cake from my project archives. I know, I know – opening day was last week – but so was my Birthday!

For a while, I was tasked with making my friend Julie’s Birthday cake every year (you’ll see more of these later this year). Every year it would be a new challenge to create something better than the year before. This year in particular I had the zany idea to try to make an ice-cream cake – which is even funnier if you know that I’m lactose intolerant. But a challenge is a challenge.

Now, this was in the days long before Pinterest, so I couldn’t really look up how to do this the “right” way – I just had to figure out a way to do it.

Ice Cream Center: I decided I should make the ice cream center before I baked my cake. I used the same 8” round cake pan I planned to use to make the cake, so the center would be the same size/line up with the cake. I took the mint chocolate chip ice cream out of the freezer and let it defrost for a while. It needed to be soft enough to force into the shape of the pan. I scooped the softened ice cream into the cake pan and pressed firmly to ensure no air bubbles as well as smoothed the top. Then just popped it into the freezer. Once the ice cream was frozen again, I ran the pan under hot water to loosen the ice cream. I transferred the ice cream disk to waxed paper and put it back into the freezer until I was ready to assemble the cake. (I just trimmed off the ice cream that had melted around the edges.)

Cake: I baked the caked as normal. Once cooled, I trimmed the tops off to create a flat surface using my cake wire cutter. Then I assembled the cake with the ice cream disk in the center. I frosted the cake quickly with white vanilla frosting and popped it back into the freezer.

Decorations: To say Julie was/is obsessed with the Angel’s is a huge understatement, so I went with that theme for the design. I decided to make the top of the cake look like a baseball and include the Angel’s Logo. Using a printout as a template I cut out the logo from fondant – in three layers. I was being lazy, so instead of coloring the fondant correctly – I actually painted the fondant with food coloring – not my best decision. I popped those into the freezer to “Dry” before assembling the layers of the logo. Using a bit of icing, I assembled the layers to build the Angel’s logo.

To create the baseball effect I used black and red food gel and piped it onto the cake.

The cake remained in the freezer until it was time to serve.

No one at the party could believe I made this cake, but again – this was before Pinterest. People were a lot more impressed before. ; )

I also had one happy Birthday Girl!