Football Jersey Cake

Now I will admit I am not much of  a sports fan (except for hockey, and even then I just like the fighting). Oh sure I like going to sporting events, because they serve beer, but the actual games and players, meh. I don't hate it, I just could care less. Unless there is taco dip being served, then I will go to whatever football/baseball/curling viewing party you have. Anyway, this rambling preceeds me talking about a cake I did a month or two ago of a Packer jersey. I started off with a quarter sheet, which I filled and stacked.

Because I didn't want the hassle of making and cutting extra cake, I decided to go with rice cereal treats for the collar and sleeves. You can't really tell in the picture, but one thing I made sure to do was taper the ends of the sleeves, which I prefer to the cakes where every element is at the same height/level. Any contrast , to me, adds a little more character to the cake

Then I covered everything in a white chocolate ganache.

The sleeves and collar were still a little too bumpy because of the RKT, so I added a thin layer of modeling chocolate over those areas so the final fondant layer would be nice and smooth.

Then I covered the entire thing with fondant, using gumpaste tools to indent lines for the hems. I also ran a pastry stitching wheel in the indents to make it look a little bit like sewn hems.

The first layer of green airbrush.

And another.

Adding some brown for more depth:

Then I made templates for the numbers using cereal boxes (I like to use them printed side down as they are glossy and mostly non-stick).

I cut them out of the gumpaste, then moved them carefully to the Wilton cake lifter, and let them sit a few minutes so they would be less likely to move/distort:

I used rulers laid out to make sure I was centering the numbers correctly-laying the paper templates I had made to get the positioning right. When doing a deceptively simple cake like this, it is even more important to get everything as close to perfect as you can:

I used my x-acto to score around the paper as a guide for when I would lay the actual gumpaste on:

Same sort of deal for the name- I pieced together the name I was using and used a paper printout to get the right spacing:

Then I added stripes on the neck and sleeves, hand-painted the yellow, then added some layers of brown airbrush for depth:

Adding more darks/shadows with brown and black airbrush color:

And there you go:)