Softball Field Cake

This cake was made for my church's softball team's end of season picnic. I had in mind to do a 14-inch square cake, but I don't have any 14-inch square pans. So I used 16-inch square pans instead. After baking, the tops of the cakes were already pretty flat except for a bit of rounding around the edges. So instead of using a leveler to take the tops off, I stacked the cakes and then carved off about 3/4 inch from each side.


The cake was filled with a strawberry butter cream filling. I made that by taking my regular butter cream recipe and putting in some strawberry extract instead of vanilla extract. It worked great and everyone liked it. I covered it with some regular butter cream colored green.

To make the fences, I made a stiff royal icing and piped it onto wax paper. I printed out patterns on the computer. I tried it first with a number 1 tip for the fence and number 3 tip for the bars. But the pieces broke too easily coming off of the wax paper. So I switched to a number 2 and number 4 tip and it came off easier. I still had to come up with inventive ways to remove the wax paper because, even with the large tip sizes, it was still breaking. Fortunately, I made extra fence material. You can see in the picture that one piece of fence was still broken.

The bases and pitching rubber are just fondant and the dirt is graham cracker crumbs mixed with table sugar.