DIY Football Jersey Cake

My niece was having a football themed party to celebrate her 18th birthday. I decided to make a football jersey cake in the colors of her favorite team, the Carolina Panthers. Here are the steps I followed to make the cake:

My sister was expecting quite a large gathering, so I doubled the cake recipe and baked it in my 10" x 14" roasting pan. 

After it cooled, I leveled it with a cake leveler. You could also use a serrated knife.

Here's where things went a bit askew. I planned on using this template to make the cake...

but when I realized how much of a dome I had after leveling the cake, I decided to use the top to make the sleeves. I hate wasting cake.

It was a good idea, until I realized it wouldn't fit on my cake board. Duh!

I ended up having to trim the sides of the cake anyway for it to fit on my board. It was at this time that I wrapped my cake board with a portion of a blue plastic tablecloth. I wanted the white jersey to be able to stand out against the cake board. I also flipped the cake over so I wouldn't have to worry about crumbs on top.

Next, I trimmed the sleeves to make them better resemble a jersey.

I applied a fairly generous crumb coat of icing, mostly because I wanted to make sure the sleeves adhered well. I let that set in the refrigerator while I colored a little bit of my icing.

I pulled up a picture of Cam Newton's jersey to use as a guide. The black and blue stripes on the sleeves were easy to free hand.

I'm not great at lettering and there isn't much room for error when writing black icing on a white cake. I cut a piece of wax paper the right size, wrote the birthday girl's name on it, and practiced piping the icing on the wax paper a few times. Once I was confident with the size and spacing, I piped her name on the cake.

I also drew the numbers on wax paper, cut them out, and traced them with blue icing so I could get the numbers to look decent. I thinned out the black icing and used my spatula to gently spread it on. Here's the finished cake:

There you have it--simple and fun!