Tennis Court Cake

So this post is more an Ikea style instruction leaflet than a recipe. For my father's birthday I decided to make a cake that would be close to his heart - tennis themed. Before I was born he was already passionate about tennis - playing it, watching it, living it. Our pets were often named after tennis players - Steffi, Andre...

So to start, I made a chocolate cake which you will find the recipe for here. Remember to take it out of the oven as soon as that skewer is clean! Any longer and you'll have a dry cake.

I also made a basic meringue buttercream - exactly like my chocolate buttercream that you can find here, but without the addition of chocolate at the end. I found that because it was hot, my buttercream just wasn't thickening. To fix this, place the mixing bowl in the fridge for half an hour then take out and mix again. Keep refrigerating and mixing until it's thickened nicely.

So to get to the assembly. Even before I made the cake and the icing, I got the fiddly bits over and done with. I first made a mini banner to serve as the "tennis net" in the middle of the "court". All you need is candles, baker's twine and some scrap paper.

Now the part that did my head in - working with fondant to make a racquet and ball. I'll be honest, I've worked with fondant less than 5 times in my life. But I can never seem to figure out how professionals get their figurines and things so smooth and lump free.

I let them dry a bit to stiffen up so that I could transport them to a plastic container to keep until I needed them.

To assemble the cake, I sawed my rectangular cake in half and dolloped 1/3 of the buttercream to sandwich the layers. I added about half of a small bottle of lime green gel food colouring to the remaining buttercream and beat it in. The difficult part was spreading the buttercream onto the cake so that it would be smooth and even. I'm learning though (I think).

Finally for the finishing touches - rolled out some white fondant "base lines" for the court then everything else just gets placed on top. And now for some pictures of my amateur cake fail...

Teddy, I said you can't have any