Miniature Golf Cake

In the middle of last week, I got a text message from a friend of mine. She said that her usual cake lady was booked up and unable to make her son’s birthday cake for the upcoming weekend—and she wondered if I might be interested.

Now, I very rarely do cakes for money, because honestly, in order to make them worth my time, I’d have to charge a lot more than most people are willing to pay. They take a lot of time and effort. However, since this was for a friend in a bind—and since it had been a long while since I’d made an elaborate cake like this—I decided to do it for the fun of it. (For the record, my friend did give me a little bit of money, too.)

Jack was having his 8th birthday party at a miniature golf course, so Julie asked if I could do a golf theme. A few Google Image searches later, and I found my inspiration cake. And then a few days later, I had this:

When planning the cake, I sketched it out on a post-it first. I made the 8, and then decided to fill in the holes of the 8 with “sand” as if they were sand traps.

I made a half sheet cake, torted it, filled it with buttercream, then iced it with a green buttercream. I got it as smooth as I could—or at least as smooth as I had the patience for. I used round objects from my kitchen (think bowls, containers, etc.) to draw an 8 on a piece of parchment paper. I cut it out, including the circles in the middle, and then placed it on top of my cake. I traced the 8 into the icing with a toothpick. To make the sand traps lie more level with the icing, I dug little pits in the surface of the icing where the circles were. I put shortbread cookies in the food processor and then sprinkled the crumbs into the spots for my sand traps. I then removed the parchment template.

Next, I took my remaining green icing and added more brown and green dye to it in order to make it a darker shade of green. From there, I made the “grass” with a Wilton #233 tip.

Earlier in the day, I had made a half batch of marshmallow fondant, and split it up to make several colors (I made a handful-sized amount of each color). I used a mix of Wilton and Americolor gels to dye the fondant. I shaped all of the little fondant items—a “tee pad” (or whatever they are!), golf clubs with colorful handles, golf balls, and a flag (which is attached to a cake support dowel). I let the fondant pieces sit out on a cutting board overnight to dry out a bit so they would harden.

The morning of the party, I used my leftover fondant to make all of the letters, cutting them out with cookie cutters. I put all of the fondant pieces on the cake, laid out the letters and… boom. This cake was done and ready to party.

This cake was time consuming—as is any cake that requires so many fondant colors/pieces—but overall, it was relatively simple (as far as cakes go). I’m glad that I did it, because I did have fun with it. It’s crazy to think about how I used to have so much time to do stuff like this more often! What was that even like?! :)

Also, a special shout-out to Michael for supporting this effort. He picked up my slack around the house—entertaining the girls, carting Nora to dance class, cleaning before we hosted dinner on Saturday night, and of course, help with all of the DISHES! It would’ve been much harder to do this without him.