A Collingwood FC cake for a football-mad boss

No one who knows my boss (or for that matter, any of his relatives) could doubt that he is football-mad. Not only was he rather a good player in the State league, he has a lifelong, mad allegiance to the Collingwood Football Club. Unfortunately, Collingwood (despite its passionate fan base) is the most unpopular club in the history of Australian competition, so when it came to the boss's birthday, I had an extremely difficult decision to make...

...Could I quell my own distaste for his hideous team....

... In order to make him happy with a Collingwood-themed birthday cake??

Well, clearly, it turns out that I could, and did. Many doubted my sanity, but I pushed onward, and tried not to think of all the Collingwood supporters leering at my cake with their gappy-toothed smiles and their jailhouse tattoos.

First I needed a model for the dreaded Collingwood logo, so I turned to the interwebs for that. I tried to find the clearest graphic that I could:

Then I needed to start with the basics - this is a chocolate mud cake coated with chocolate ganache and hot-knifed to be absolutely smooth.

For detailed instructions on that process, click here. (The link relates to ganaching cupcakes, but the process is the same for larger cakes.)

I then rolled a large sheet of white fondant icing and covered the cake's top and sides entirely with it, trimming the base carefully.

Now it was time to get to work on the detail. I cut two wavy triangles for the two flags at the base of the logo. The black-and-white Collingwood flag was fairly easy, but this one - the Australian flag - was fiddly.

I started with the Union Jack in the corner and then drew the outlines of the stars. Then I coloured in the rest in blue. I used food grade (non toxic) textas - the cheapest and easiest way to get these is to go to a good toyshop and ask for non toxic, washable children's markers. Crayola is fine for food colouring and works well.

I cut a tiny shield from rolled white fondant and printed the requisite foundation date of the Club (as neatly as I could - it's not easy to print neat letters with a soft nibbed texta onto soft-surfaced findant).

This picture shows several of the elements of the logo together: you can see the flag shapes partially cropped from the picture at the bottom, still unpainted, the shield shape, not yet printed, the wheat sheaves to go on the sides and the main oval plaque. I cut out all of the shapes first and put them together loosely so I could work out whether the basic proportions were right.

White-on-black lettering is harder than black-on-white, because you must first draw hollow letter shapes, then colour carefully around them. You can see this process underway in this picture.

The magpie in the centre was a hand drawn equivalent of the one on the logo - it could have been better but it was ok for this purpose. I copied it as closely as I could from the picture because the trick with this kind of cake is to be as accurate as you can.

The finished logo was assembled from each individual piece after each had been coloured/lettered. I used a very small amount of water to stick the pieces together - you need to be really careful when using water near colourings, as the cake's surface was pure white, and there is always a danger that the colours may run - you have been warned.

Presentation of the cake was somewhat delayed, as the boss was out of the office on the actual day, with a shocking feverish cold. We got it couriered to his house where it managed to put a smile on his face - and even better, he brought the remains of it back to work the next day, so we all got a chance to COMPLETELY DESTROY the Collingwood logo in a ceremonial, knife-wielding way!


Happy footballing from Dr Cupcake!