Red Ball 4 Cake

And just like that, the not so little big boy is 8 years old!! He's into all sorts of video games (wait, are they still called that? Haa. so old), like Roblox and Ori and the Blind Forest. Half the time I have no idea how to play these things. But for his birthday this year, he requested for a Red Ball 4-themed cake: square guy on the bottom, red ball on top. Red Ball is a puzzle adventure game where the player has to guide Red Ball through obstacles to get to the end of each level, finish all the missions and save the world from turning square. Dom's actually pretty good at it! 

Red Ball 4 Birthday Cake

So for the round red ball, I baked up chocolate sponge cake in a ball pan, sandwiched together with whipped dark chocolate ganache. I needed something light that would hold the spherical shape so I went with a sponge instead of the usual heavy butter cake. 

round Red Ball cake

If using a heavier cake, usually people will use cereal treats for the bottom half of the sphere so that the ball doesn't look oblong. I crumb coated the ball cake with Swiss meringue buttercream and then covered it with red fondant. It's a little tricky to smoothen out the fondant, especially as you get down to the bottom of the sphere, but just be patient and all those wrinkles will eventually iron out. 

whatcha lookin' at?

Now for the bottom cube, it's pretty much a two tier cake, with the bottom half being devil's food cake with whipped dark chocolate ganache, and the top half being a carrot cake with walnuts and cream cheese Swiss meringue buttercream filling. 

Red Ball 4 Black Square enemy cake

I find that square cakes are trickier to ice smoothly versus round cakes, but since this cake was going to be covered in dark grey fondant, I didn't have to make sure that all the dark cake was covered by frosting, unlike when covering with a white or lighter coloured fondant. 

fun fondant lettering

Luckily this was a simpler designed cake cuz I had so much on my plate this weekend! We had taken an opportune slot to book a chalet for Dom's birthday but I already had committed to cakes! Anyway so after covering the cakes with fondant and putting on fondant faces, the cake was pretty much done! 

Black Square waiting for Red Ball to show up

I decorated the board with some leftover edible image cutouts from his birthday cake at school, and with fondant lettering, replacing the "O" in his name with a smaller Red Ball cutout. 

Red Ball 4 cake and desserts

For other dessert items, I made Nutella fudge brownies, layered pandan agar-agar jelly cups and some Oreo pudding cups.

Happy with his Red Ball!

Box Enemy Goodie Boxes

He had a whole bunch of friends over for his Red Ball 4 birthday party, where we played lots of "Minute to Win It" type party games. Check out this post for more party details! For the giveaways, I got these awesome custom-made Red Ball 4 enemy boss boxes from All Mommy Wants, filled with custom-labelled Kit-Kats (scored cookies & cream Kit-Kats from the store!), Hello Panda, strawberry milk, Nerds and red stress balls with smiley faces on them (so cheap from China!). I love how the boxes were able to be stacked! 

Treat boxes and customized goodies from All Mommy Wants

As usual, it was chaos trying to get a good group shot of all the kids together, and this is the best one we could get! Haaa. Happy Big Red Ball 8 to my big boy, Dominic! 

Red Ball 4 Birthday Party

let's cut the cake!

a little "brain surgery" :P

carrot cake and devil's food cake slices

Happy Red Ball 8, Domi!!!