Great idea...okay cake

I was asked to make an Ohio State wedding shower cake. I was pretty excited about this because it combines my two favorite things - a football team I love & cake! As usual, the internal parts of the cake were easy peasy. I made a basic chocolate butter cake with chocolate buttercream between the layers. I iced the outside with classic buttercream. As I'm sure I've said before, I hate piping icing and I pretty much suck at it. So I opted for doing little dots around the outside ring. I was going for a wedding cake look.

The bad part is the chocolate inside was trying to ooze a little and when I iced around the outside, I kept noticing a dark ring where the chocolate layer was in the middle. I put ribbon around to hide the darkness. To be honest, this might have been one of those things where no one else would have noticed but it drove me nuts!

Now came the fun part. I wanted to incorporate the OSU logo but I didn't want it to look like the groom graduated or something. I came up with lots of ideas, but the one that sounded best to me was to link two OSU "O"s to look like linked wedding rings. I first printed out the logo and cut and pasted them to look like what I wanted. Then I made up some royal icing and piped it onto wax paper.





Here is when things went horribly wrong. It seemed like a great idea. I know from reading (and personal experience) that royal icing will dry to an incredible hardness. Unfortunately, if it's sitting on wax paper, it stays moist underneath. So, when I tried to remove the decoration I made it came apart completely. I was so upset about this, I almost had a breakdown. Due to time restraints, I had to just pipe it on top of the cake. It came out like this. I hated it. But I also became determined to do better.

Expect more tales of my piping adventures. I'm going to get this icing to work if it kills me!!