Super Bowl Party!

   The Super Bowl has always been a great time for a party.  Alyssa bought me a football pan a couple of years ago and it's never really turned out very well for us.  This time I figured I could put a little something together.  As I was browsing cake central, I came across a different IMBC recipe that I decided to try.  It was really good.  It came together really well and had a nice taste to it.   One thing I haven't quite figured out yet is how to smooth IMBC.  I read that you can take a knife dipped in warm water to smooth it, but that just caused streaks in the cake.

  If you look closely here you can see the separate shades of the brown where I ran the knife over and the areas I didn't.  Additionally, it didn't really smooth very well, but it was a rounded cake, so I think that was part of the problem.  The brown is actually my first attempt at Chocolate IMBC.  I melted about 4 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate and added it to half of the frosting.  The chocolate made the IMBC runny which made it a little harder to work with.  Additionally, I tried to darken the chocolate with some brown, but it wasn't going any darker.  The regular vanilla was nice and firm and the stars for the logos and the stripes on the ball piped in nice and firm.  To do the logos, I did a piping transfer.  I printed out the logos, and then traced them onto some parchment paper with piping gel.  I then placed the parchment paper on the cake and transfered the gel to the cake for the outline.  For the Colts side, I placed the parchment paper on before the frosting had set up, so the frosting stuck to the paper.  If you look at the center of the horseshoe, you can see where the frosting got pulled up.

   The logo for the saints was initially supposed to be gold with a black border, but I could not get a good gold color and apparently there is not a gold coloring.  The grass was added using a #233 grass tip.  The cake looked great, but the taste was lacking.  The football cake pan takes a really long time to cook, so the cake came out really dry.  The edges were practically burnt and rock hard.  The chocolate IMBC was definitely a win though. More practice and testing needed to get the taste and consistency needed so I can decorate with it.  I'm not a big fan of Semi-Sweet chocolate, so I want to try milk chocolate next time.

Stats:

• Yellow Cake Mix - Better than ? Cake.
• Vanilla IMBC for decorations.
• Chocolate IMBC for football.

FTW:

• Football Cake!
• Chocolate IMBC badge earned

FTL:

• Cake was extremely dry.
• Chocolate frosting came out runny.
• Couldn't smooth the IMBC as well as I would have liked.