Portfolio: Texas State Graduation Cake

Congrats to my sister-in-law Michelle!  Yesterday we celebrated her graduation from Texas State University in San Marcos, TX.  Michelle is the first of her siblings to get her degree and we are very proud of her!  The school's mascot is a bobcat, and Michelle and I had joked about doing a bobcat shaped cake, 3D and everything.  Well, it wasn't quite like that, but I think it was still neat and Michelle loved it.

Here's our graduate with her mascot–my husband's grandparents have a stuffed bobcat they picked up from some antique show years ago and they brought him to graduation to celebrate the event!

The school's cheer is "Eat 'em up, Cats!" but I thought that might be a little overkill on the cake ;o)

The cake is red velvet, which is becoming Michie's signature flavor–everything I do for her is red velvet!  I tried to make this one more maroon, but it looked more brown than anything.  It still tasted like red velvet and that's what matters most.  I had found an image online of the bobcat logo and printed it out.  I then cut it out and used that as a stencil to cut out the logo from fondant.  Because there were two colors involved, I layered the stencil.  I cut out the entire thing and then traced that onto yellow fondant.  Setting that aside, I then cut off the yellow border on the stencil and then traced it out of maroon fondant.  I placed maroon on top of yellow and voila!  Bobcat logo from fondant, ready for applying to the cake.

Something else I used this time around: an icing tip!  These things are huge and I honestly don't know how I lived without one before now.  It really made icing the cake way easier.  I will have to start stocking 22" bags, but that's OK.  Whatever it takes to make things more efficient!