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Basketball-Backboard-Shaped Cake
Ingredients:
Cake-Shaping Strip (from 6 sushi-mat segments)
Heavy-duty aluminum foil
Sheet pan
Small oven-safe bowl
Prepared cake batter (from about 2 boxes of cake mix)
2 (16-oz.) containers of store-bought white frosting
Black icing gel
Instructions:
1. Line a sheet pan with two sheets of aluminum foil - one laid vertically and the other horizontally (extending over the edges of the sheet pan). Shape the Cake-Shaping Strip into a shape of the backboard. Make sure that the hoop portion of the backboard is just wider than the diameter of your oven-safe bowl. Exaggerate the spatial features, as they'll seem smaller after you unwrap and ice the cake. Wrap the bottom foil layers around the strip, cutting the foil if needed. Press small balls of foil into outer corners or edges if you think that the foil didn't wrap around the portion well enough to prevent cake-batter leakage. Wrap additional 3x6-inch pieces of foil around select regions of the strip if needed to prevent leaking.
2. Prepare your cake batter. Spray the strip and foil and the oven-safe bowl with cooking spray. Pour the cake batter into the prepared backboard "pan" and the bowl and bake until done.
3. Cut away any cake batter that leaked through the strip. Carefully remove the Cake-Shaping Strip. Insert the flat edge of a table knife between the strip and the cake if this helps. Remove the cake from the bowl. Let the cakes cool.
4. Using a serrated knife, cut the top off of the bowl cake so that it is flat. Apply a layer of frosting to the cut surface and place it on top of the other cake where you wish the ball to be positioned.
5. Apply a thin layer of frosting over the entire combined cake, and let the frosting dry.
6. Frost the round cake with orange-dyed frosting, and use black icing to make the lines on the basketball. Frost the remaining surfaces of the cake with white frosting. Pipe on red-dyed frosting to make red lines on the backboard and to make the basketball hoop over the basketball.
7. Combine the rest of the blacking icing gel with white frosting to make gray icing. Put this gray icing in a piping bag and pipe the net onto portions of the ball and backboard cake segments.
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