Football Shirt Birthday Cake - Easy Step-by-Step Tutorial

Looking for an easy football shirt birthday cake? This simple football shirt cake can be made from a square cake, so you don't need a specialist shaped cake tin. It's a great birthday cake for football fans and can be decorated in the colours of their favourite team.

I've made several football shirt cakes over the years, and this is a relatively simple way to create a personalised football birthday cake at home. You can add the birthday boy or girl's name, shirt number, team colours and even a football club badge to make it completely personal.

Here's how to cut and decorate a square cake to create your own football shirt birthday cake.

How to cut a cake into a Football shirt shape

How to Decorate a Football Shirt Birthday Cake

1. Assemble the shirt shape: Once the cake has been cut, place the pieces onto your cake board to form the football shirt shape as shown above. Make sure you're happy with the shape before decorating.
2.  Cover with buttercream: Coat the whole cake with a layer of buttercream, using a pallet knife to create a reasonably smooth surface.
3. Add the sugar paste: Roll out the sugar paste until it is large enough to cover your cake. Carefully lift it onto the cake using your rolling pin and gently smooth it over the surface, paying particular attention to the sleeves. Using a sharp knife, trim the excess sugar paste from around the base of the cake.
4. Add the football shirt details: Once the icing is smooth, you can personalise your football shirt cake with collars, sleeve edges, stripes, a shirt number and the birthday person's name.
   You can pipe details using royal icing or icing tubes or cut shapes from sugar paste. You can use printed edible icing for the football club badge. Your local cake decorating shop may be able to provide edible icing or printed cake decorations for you. You can also find these from specialist cake decorating suppliers online.

Tips for Making a Football Shirt Cake

• You can also use buttercream to decorate the cake if you don't want to use sugar paste. Just colour the buttercream using food colouring paste.
• Use a cake sponge that's quite firm and not too crumbly or the cake will be difficult to coat with buttercream once it has been cut into small shapes. A madeira sponge is good to use or you could try freezing the cake pieces before you coat them with buttercream.
• Use string to measure your cake then hold the string over the rolled out icing to see if it is big enough to cover it.
• Add 'grass' to decorate your cake board. You can use green sugar paste or colour your buttercream with a green gel paste and pipe the 'grass' onto the board, I use a Wilton grass piping tip.

Football Shirt Cake Ideas

Here are some of the football shirt cakes I've made using this basic technique. You can adapt the design to any team colours and personalise the shirt with a name and number.