For my nephew’s 3rd birthday, the cake team decided to go with a sports theme.  Even though baseball season is winding down, we thought it would be fun to make a baseball cake.  The birthday boy actually got to help pick the flavor of the cake this year and he requested chocolate.  (Actually, he requested “grape cake” first, but I am pretty sure he was imagining a big platter of grapes and not a grape-flavored cake!)

My Mom baked the chocolate cake using the Hershey’s Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake recipe.  We considered baking the cake in a Pyrex bowl so it would be a half sphere shape, but some Googling revealed that it can be difficult to make sure the center of the cake is adequately cooked without burning the edges.  So we baked two 8″ round cakes, and then used a simple butter and confectioner’s sugar frosting to ’round’ things out a bit.  We used red cookie icing to decorate the cake with the stitching and a “3”.

This may have been our simplest cake project yet, but it was still a great cake and we had fun making it.  And yes, the cake was served with fruit salad which included grapes.

• Desserts