We had a joint birthday party on Saturday for my two boys, the eldest turned 6 and the younger will be 3 shortly. I wasn’t sure what to do for cakes, so I asked my eldest and he immediately replied that he wanted a football cake. I googled ideas for cakes and came across the idea of cooking the cake in a pudding bowl to give that rounded appearance and then realised that this would also make a fabulous ladybird cake body (watch this space for more details on that).

Obviously because the cake is much deeper it’s a different recipe to the normal victoria sponge and it is cooked for much longer but in a lower heat oven. The recipe that I found specified 1 hour and 15 mins cooking, but I found I needed around an hour and 45 minutes as the cake was still VERY gooey in the middle at that point.

I was really pleased with the result. It isn’t perfect but given that it was on show for the grand total of 5 minutes to 20 noisy children, it didn’t really matter. Here’s how I did it.

Ingredients

• 4 eggs
• 250g self-raising flour
• 125g plain flour
• 250g margarine (or butter, but I used stork)
• 250g superfine caster sugar
• 4 tbs milk

Cooking Method

Preheat oven to 160c

Beat the butter or margarine until soft, add the sugar, then beat until pale-coloured and fluffy.

Add the eggs, one at a time, with a tablespoon or two of flour to prevent curdling.

Mix the remaining flour at a slow speed to combine well

Add the milk to make a good dropping consistency

Pour the cake mixture into a well greased bowl.

Bake in a preheated oven (160C) for about one hour fifteen minutes

Check with skewer to see if it’s cooked – if there is any runny mixture on the skewer continue cooking, checking at 10 – 15 minute intervals until clean skewer emerges

When cooked, leave the cake to cool in the bowl for 10 minutes, then, turn it out onto a wire rack to cool completely.  I made my cakes in advance and froze them, removing them from the freezer about 2 hours before I wanted to decorate them.

Decoration

• Buttercream
• White ready-made fondant icing
• Red paste food colouring
• Black paste food colouring

Cut the cake in half and generously apply jam to the middle of the cake

Place the two halves of the cake back together and cover the outside with buttercream (about 125g butter and 250g of icing sugar creamed together until fluffy)

Colour a small amount of your fondant icing red and another small amount black.  Set aside.

Roll out your white fondant icing and smooth in place over your cake.

Roll out the red fondant icing, cut circles of icing and them trim these into hexagonal shapes.

Slightly dampen the underneath of one of the hexagonal shapes and place it onto the cake, drawing lines radiating from it to connect to the next hexagonal shape.  These lines should form hexagons (look at the picture to see what I mean)

Continue to apply two more red hexagons, then apply some black until the cake is covered.

I sprayed a little pearlescent food colouring to give it a sheeny finish, but this is optional. Le voila!