I’ll be honest with you, when I was first asked to make this globe cake for our church’s mission trip fundraising event I was honored, but also extremely nervous! I had never made a sphere cake before. I had no idea what size pans to use, and my biggest fear was how in the world to get the icing smooth on a round cake?? BUT, I decided to give it a go.
So I did some research. Of course that means googling “how to make a globe cake?”. I found and watched some very helpful YouTube videos. The most valuable thing I learned was that I needed a flexible dough scraper. I wouldn’t have even thought about using a flexible dough scraper, so bless you YouTube cake decorators!
I ordered my pans, my flexible dough scraper, and got to work on making my globe cake.
I used 8 inch round pans and painted them with my homemade pan release. I filled them about 3/4 full and baked them as usual. I make sure I put down a good layer of buttercream onto my cake drum before putting my cake on.
I was a little worried about getting the cakes out of the pans, but thanks to my homemade pan release they slipped right out. I let them cool and then torted (fancy word for layered) them with a serrated knife. I contemplated for a while if I was going to torte them or not. Would I be pushing my luck? But I finally decided to start praying and torting because I really didn’t want that big of a chunk of cake with no icing. I’m a lots of icing kinda girl.
Torting the cake layers was not hard. Although my torting skills by hand are not perfect, hence why I love my cake leveler, everything turned out OK. I then filled and stacked the layers just like I would for a regular cake.
After getting all of the layers filled and stacked, I let the cake sit in the freezer for about 30 minutes. A cold cake is always easier to crumb coat no matter the shape.
I used a regular cake spatula for the crumb coat and my new flexible dough scraper to smooth it out. After the cake was completely crumb coated I did add some royal icing (recipe here) around the base of the cake because it wasn’t sturdy or as attached to the cake board for my liking. I placed the cake into the refrigerator to let the royal icing and the crumb coat harden.
I colored my buttercream blue for my final layer of buttercream and frosted and smoothed it with my cake spatula and flexible scraper.
How to Make a Globe Cake
After adding my final layer of buttercream, I began working on my countries. I wanted a lighter color of green to contrast the blue so I colored my fondant with leaf green. It was 100% fondant with no tylose added because I wanted it to lay flat on my cake. (For more about tylose read here). I looked through our Atlases for homeschool and found a perfect map I wanted to use. I copied the map onto card stock, cut out the countries and used them as a template to cut out my fondant.
I added a light coat of water to the back of my fondant and attached all of the countries to the cake.
You can’t see it very well in the picture, but since this cake was for the mission team’s trip to Nepal in November, I added a “pin” to the country of Nepal. My pin was made out of a half of a toothpick and a tiny ball of red fondant. I thought it added a very cute touch.
I also added the banner to the front of the cake board to give it a little more detail. I show you how to make that in a tutorial here.
Overall I was pretty proud of myself for how the cake turned out and even prouder that I tried something new! I hope this tutorial helps you if you will be making a globe cake anytime soon!
Happy decorating!
~Nicole
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