I wanted to make my friend a “Friday Night Lights” themed cake for her birthday because we share a love for the show…and for Tim Riggins (#noshame). However, I wasn’t too sure about showing up to some hip Greenpoint bar with a super brotastic Football inspired cake, so I decided to tone it down a bit. Months ago I had seen a girl on the subway with this evil eye heart handbag and instantly had the urge to make a cake inspired by it, however, I never had the opportunity…until now. I was thinking of ideas for the cake when it hit me – what about following Coach Taylor’s “Clear Eyes. Full Hearts. Can’t Lose!” motto and incorporating an evil eye and a heart into the cake! Perfect! That’s how the design came to fruition and this is what resulted. Once I finished decorating the cake, I added a banner of the motto atop to really drive home the FNL association. So, this ladies and gentleman, is my “Friday Night Lights” themed cake, but we can also just call it an Evil Eye Heart Cake to play it cool. Follow along below to see how I made it, along with more photos, as well as a very important note about all of the DIY posts on this blog.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The following DIY and techniques / tips are being provided by me for those of you who would like to make your own heart cake or evil eye heart cake. If you aren’t up for the challenge of making it, please just admire it and move on. I make DIY posts of desserts to provide my readers with tutorials, tips, and my personal insight to inspire them to make their own. THIS IS A DIY BLOG, to inspire you to DIY these projects yourself. This is not a blog intended for you to find images of desserts you like and then send them to your local baker to make. I make these cakes for fun with the hopes of inspiring you to challenge yourself and make them too, regardless of your baking experience (don’t forget, I too am completely 100% self-taught). The dessert ideas and designs are my own, based off of inspiration I’ve come across. It’s been upsetting to see my designs get sold in other bakeries with zero attribution – designs I’ve brainstormed, conceptualized, baked, and photographed the process just to share with you. To be fair – I get it, people send requests of cakes all the time to bakeries to use as inspiration. But these cakes on my DIY site are not intended for that, and I’d so appreciate you not using them in that way. I hope you can see where I’m coming from here, and thank you for listening. To those of you who come here to be inspired and try these projects on your own, I love you. You have no idea how much happiness you bring me. I do this for you!

EVIL EYE HEART CAKE

Materials Needed:

• 2 x rectangular sheet cakes, baked and cooled
• Paper and scissors
• 2 batches of buttercream frosting
• Red gel food coloring
• Wax paper
• Spatula
• Frosting scraper
• Fondant
• Circular cookie cutters
• Red + teal (or blue or green) sanding sugar
• Black edible marker
• Optional: Paper banner, gold paper

Directions:

Step #1: Prepare one batch of buttercream frosting. Once your two sheet cakes have cooled, take a large piece of paper and cut out a heart template from it, keeping it around the same size as your sheet cake. For each sheet cake, use a knife to carve out the heart by placing the template on top and cutting around it. Frost the top of one heart cake, add a think layer of buttercream and then position your second cake atop that. Add 1-2 crumb layers of buttercream around the exterior of the cake and place in the cake the fridge to set. [Note: You could also arrange a square cake and a circular cake (like this), but if you’re going for a larger (multi-layered) and wider shaped heart as I was, use rectangular pans.]

Step #2: Prepare your second batch of buttercream, this time adding red food coloring to dye the frosting. Frost your cake with the dyed buttercream. It’s okay if the frosting color is more of a pink hue, you just don’t want it to be white, as that will show through the sanding sugar that will be added in Step #5.

Step #3: Cut out two identical pointed oval / evil eye shaped templates fromwax paper. Roll out a ball of fondant to a 1/8-inch thickness on wax paper (or a Silpat), positioning your wax paper template on top and follow the template to cut the fondant to the size of the eye. Use circular cookie cutters to cut out the center of the eye (the iris) and the pupil, but wait 30 minutes before removing them to let the fondant dry a bit and firm up.

Step #4: Once you’ve removed the pupil and iris, use a black edible marker to color the pupil. For the iris, I brushed on a light layer of vodka and then sprinkled it with teal sanding sugar. You can do this a number of different ways, but I always find vodka to be the best way to adhere sugar to fondant. [Note: Although it’s pictured as one piece above, I actually arranged each of the three pieces separately and then arranged them atop the cake in the next step.]

Step #5: Position the second wax paper template you cut for your evil eye in the center of your frosted cake. Once the cake has been sitting out for a couple minutes, sprinkle red sanding sugar over the entire cake and along the sides, using your hand to evenly smooth the sugar across the cake. Place the cake back in the fridge for a few minutes to allow the sugar to set into the buttercream. [Note: Make sure to work on a covered, disposable surface so clean up won’t be a nightmare!]

Step #6: After the cake has re-set, take out of the fridge and gently remove the wax paper. Add a few droplets of water to the bare, un-sugared buttercream (or to the back of each of your fondant eye pieces) and carefully position your three fondant eye pieces, first the white pointed oval, then the teal iris, and lastly the black pupil.

Optional: If you’d like to add a banner as I did, just print out your banner design on paper. Cut out the banner, add a little glue to the backside, and then adhere wax paper. Allow the glue to completely dry, then use scissors to cut the excess wax paper. And for some added jazz, adhere some glitter vinyl to your cake board.