I'm making a large baseball cake (3-D) and was hoping to avoid having to carve it. I feel like it never looks just perfect, and I love how easy the wilton sports ball cake pan is for smaller spheres, but this sphere needs to feed 20+ people so that's not an option. Has anyone ever seen a pan like this, or....used a metal mixing bowl (which was my first thought but I didn't know how it would hold up in the oven or if the cake would bake unevenly)..... I'd appreciate any advice, or maybe even just some tips on sculpting the perfect sphere. Thanks!

I made a 3D football cake just the other week. i don't have any Wilton ball pans (as they are quite hard to get hold of in the UK!). instead i used a Pirex bowl! i had no problem with it!

I did have to carve it slightly (my cake turntable helped a lot with that!) as the bowl wasn't completely spherical but it saved on loads of wasted cake off-cuts and gave me a pretty desent basic shape!

As long as you grease the bowl well then it does work! in fact i found it easier to see when the cake was completely cooked because you could see through the bowl!

I have to say that i would use a dense cake such as pound cake/Madeira cake as i used simple sponge cake and even though my ball was only 6 inches across it was struggling to stay spherical until it's own weight! HTH

thank you, I did end up using a metal mixing bowl, it worked great! who knew!? lol