LSU Tiger Stadium Revisit

Way back in October of 2008, when I made my first blog posting ever, I showed two groom's cakes -an LSU stadium cake and an armadillo. This past weekend we had another LSU stadium cake and a rainbow trout cake. I'm always amazed at how much I learn every year in regards to cake decorating skills and feel like the new LSU cake really blows away the old one. This is my third stadium cake, so I would hope that with each one, I expand my skill set. Since my first major in college was architecture, I feel like I'm carrying over the model-building skills over to cake decorating.
The fish was just plain fun to do! I don't know if it creeped out the guests, but I'm guessing they got a kick out of it.

"Cheese" Cake

We do create a lot of fun groom's cakes, but every once in a while we get to make one that is just truly unique. This groom had a quirky sense of humor and had actually been in the cheese business, so making a Parmigiano-Reggiano wheel made perfect sense. The two mice crashing the wedding were a cute touch to the cake.
Capitol Stamps in Austin created the rubber stamps that I used to imprint the "rind" of the cake. I brushed on brown food coloring for each stamping, and then airbrushed the whole cake to match the color of the actual cheese wheel. Hopefully the guests realized it was a cake and not a giant wheel of cheese (which would have been delicious, too)!

The Red Furry Monster

I don't mean to be evasive about the name, but my friend Tony put the fear of copyright infringement in my mind a while back. I'm pretty sure that the folks over at CTW aren't going sue me (I'm not exactly mass-producing these cakes and selling them on Canal Street), but just to be safe, I will refer to this cake as the Red Furry Monster cake (RFK).
That being said, RFM was for a 2 year old's birthday. He loves basketball, so we incorporated a cake one into the design. I also added RFM's pet and a gift box for festiveness. I wish the photo were a little better - I should have turned the cake around for the photo.
His slightly dilated eyes, nose and party hat are rice cereal covered in fondant. It's a little hard to tell, but his mouth is really open - I cut into the head to create the open mouth. Even though we had a lot of fun working on RFM, we started to get loopy applying the fur! I got the idea to use the meat grinder attachment on the Kitchenaid from last week's Food Network challenge. Sesame Street cakes, of all things! Perfect timing.
Cue in piano... la la la la, la la la la, RFM's world... RFM loves his goldfish...