How to make a Pull-a-part Cupcake Soccer Ball cake

To some of us a pull-a-part cupcake cake is not new, but there are a some who are still new to the concept.
It is exactly as the name suggest - pull-a-part cupcake cake.. You stack cupcakes together to form a design and then decorate it like a whole cake... when it's time to serve, let each kid pull-a-part the cupcake he wants.. Here in Israel it is almost new and fascinating.

It took this to my son's last day of school yesterday and everybody were so thrilled with the idea, especially the kids.

Let me show you how easy this is to make..

First get all your cupcakes ready. My son has 32 kids in his class, so I planned to put  between 32 to 36 cupcakes.
I made three different flavors of cupcakes.- Devil's Food Chocolate Cupcakes, Double Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes and my son's favorite Sour cream Vanilla Cupcakes. 
Frosting - I used my recipe - Vanilla Buttercream (kids love buttercream!)


Here you can see I have all my cupcakes ready.. First try and play around with them and see how to place them so you get an ideas of what it will look like and how you will work with them. 

My Devil's food chocolate cupcakes are flat on the top while the others are domed.
I wanted the soccer ball to have a flat look and the grass to be raised up. So I put all the flat cupcakes in a circle on the center of the cake board.
I used 14 cupcakes here. 

Next I spread white Vanilla frosting all over these cupcakes like so.... I used a spatula, you could also just pipe it.

You could pipe the black frosting on the white instead of using fondant.But I did not want to use too much of black color for a kids cake - so I used my chocolate fondant with little black. As you can see in this picture the fondant almost looks brown but by next morning it was truly black

The first time I made a Soccer ball cake I printed out this pentagon shape from the internet, and made a cardboard template.. Later, I found a cutter so now I use this cutter.
If you do not have a cutter don't worry, just make one or do it free hand. 

That's how it will look once you pipe or place the black pentagon shapes on.
Having an image of a soccer ball in front of you will help you with placing or piping these.

Next place the rest of the cupcakes around the soccer ball.
I used 18 cupcakes for this so in total I used 32 cupcakes for the whole cake.

You could use less and make a smaller cake of course or you could only make the soccer ball with a very thin border of grass..

I tinted the rest of my buttercream with two shapes of green and used my large Wilton grass tip. 
Here's the first green.

I piped one color all over first...

Then used the second green..... to pipe shades all over the top.

 And that's it.. your done..

Have a good day and thanks for stopping by.