Basket Ball Cake for Davy

This is Davy's second birthday cake.  He loves basketball so I made a simple cake.  The cake is a Sour Cream Pound Cake I found on line at Margie's Kitchen online.  The recipe is below. I used two recipes for each layer and a small square pan. I used a chocolate ganache filling and buttercream crumb coat.  I sprayed the layers with a simple syrup for extra moisture. I used my usual Marshmellow Fondant from the previous cake blogs.  I got my lines straighter on this cake.  I used the pound cake because it's dense and I wanted to do better on my edges.

For the basket ball I used my round pancake pan (aebleskeiver, I think it's Danish).  Worked great.  I glued two half spheres together with the chocolate filling, coated it with chocolate, filled in the bumps with fondant and wrapped it in orange fondant.  I used one of those stop skid liners you can put in your drawers to make the dimples in the ball.  I used black fondant strips for the lines.  I would have liked that to come out a bit cleaner, but all in all it turned out okay. 



Sour Cream Pound Cake
1/2 cup butter - room temperature
1 cup sugar
3 eggs - room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
3/8 teaspoon baking powder
1 pinch baking soda
1 1/2 cups flour (I used cake flour)
1/2 cup sour cream, light - room temperature

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.  Grease and flour cake pan.  With an electric mixer, beat butter until smooth.  Add sugar and mix on high until light and fluffy.  This takes longer than you think, at least five minutes.
Add vanilla and almond extract.  Beat slightly.
Add eggs one at a time.  Beat thoroughly after each egg.  Scrape the bowl down after each addition.
Add baking powder and baking soda.  Mix in.
Add flour and sour cream all at once.  Beat on low until just combined. 
Pour into loaf pan or cake pan and bake 6o minutes for loaf pan, 50 pinutes for cake pan.  check with toothpick.  Continue baking until toothpic comes out clean.  Cool on a rack about 10minutes.  Remove from pan and cool completely.

Modified from Better Homes and Garden - New Cook Book