A girl I work with wants me to do a groom's cake for her rehearsal dinner. I was looking forward to it until she said "nothing fancy, just a simple sheet cake for 80.." She wants me to do it half with his college theme, and half hers.
I suck at sheet cakes! I told her simple to me is a round or square tiered cake because I hate icing and stacking sheet cakes. I even hate getting them out of the pan. But she is insistent on a sheet cake...
For my design idea I was going to do a football field out of the sheet cake with their college logos in each end zone, and 2 corresponding team football jerseys with their last names on them. What size football field sheet do I need to make to feed 80 guests (2 layer cake)? I own a rarely used 11x15 ML pan and was hoping not to have to invest in any other size sheet pan to be rarely used. What do I do?
And any other tips, suggestions, design ideas welcome!

I kno what you mean about sheet cakes, I really dont like them... in fact take very few pics of them because they are such a pain to me. But the 11x15 pan that I have says 2 layers serves 82, to me however just a 2 layer of one of those is not going to be a very big surface for the design you have in mind.
Maybe if you did like a house divided design?? With hers on one side and his on the other with a diagnol divider between and if you could make the jerseys out of gumpaste in the school colors and paint their names on them?? I dont know, just a few ideas, HTH.

Good luck, cant wait to see the pics!

I appreciate your help but am confused about servings. The Wilton guide, which I don't take as gospel but use it as a loose guieline, says 11x15 two layer feeds 60 for a party servings, 74 for wedding servings, but since it is the rehearsal dinner I was going to use party servings.
I know it's not as big an area as I would like, but don't know how to make it propotional and big enough using what I have. Even if I scrap the football field idea I still don't know how to get the right size. But i was hoping to keep the field if I do the jerseys, just as background with fondant jerseys taking up most of the surface. They are huge football fans and were debating over using their 2 favorite football teams or their 2 colleges. Colleges won, so I figured I would tie in the football.
I guess I could just do their logos on a diagonal split which is what I think they expect, but I wanted something cuter. Even if I did that, still not sure how to get the right size.

I know a 12x18 feeds about 50 people so if you stack it it will feed about 100 but I am attaching a list of the wilton serving size chart so that you can verify the info. http://www.wilton.com/cakes/making-cakes/baking-party-cake-2-inch-pans.cfm

As far as the wilton size charts for a rehearsal dinner I would use the party size serving chart

Yeah, that was the chart I was referring to. Jeff that is a good idea, gonna pull out my pan to get an idea of what it would look like. I would hate to fall short especially since we all work in the banquet dept and the bride (catering mgr.) is marrying my manager (head of banquets) and they are always scrutinizing the cakes. One baker got black-balled last week from doing another event at the Hilton because her cakes are always too small.

I just discovered that I have a 12x18 pan, not the size I thought it was. That is how much I use it...

OK, guys and gals, I've heard this before and it always confuses me. How do you figure you get more servings by stacking a sheet cake? I do sheet cakes all the time and I've never found stacking them gives me more servings, just taller ones. I always torte mine (3 layers of cake, 2 layers of filling) and cut them 1" x 2" slices.

sugarMomma, simple math is all you need to figure out how many servings you get out of a sheet cake.

All you have to do is divide the surface area of the cake by the surface area of the size serving you are using.

A 12x18 has a surface area of 216.

If you are using the 1x2 serving size (surface area of 2), then you get 108 servings.

If you use a 1.5x1.5 serving size (surface area of 2.25), then you get 96 servings.

If you use a 1.5x2 serving size (surface area of 30, then you get 72 servings.

If you use a 2x2 serving size (surface area of 4), then you get 54 servings.

Whichever serving size, make sure you charge for the total amount of cake, not just the number of servings, otherwise you would be shorting yourself (to make the math simple, if you just charged $1 a serving, you would get anything between $54 and $108 for the same cake!).

I made a football field cake last year and made 13X9 sheet cake as the field and 2 more sheet cakes cut at diagonals to make the stands. Of course you will need to use the larger size cake pans for yours. That will add more servings if that is what you need. Just and idea. You can see it in my pics.

I made an 12x18 last week to look like a football field. In my pics. Was big enough for approx 60 ppl at the party I did it for, my friend cut fairly big slices, could really cut smaller as it was torted and filled.