Up-and-Over Rugby Groom's Cake

A few months ago, a high school friend of mine, Lori, contacted me to do a cake for her (soon-to-be) husband's groom's cake. He was a member of the Milwaukee Rugby Club and many of his rugby buddies would be at the rehearsal dinner so she wanted the cake to be appropriately themed. Her vision was to have a rugby-shaped cake made out of red velvet cake. You know, because rugby can be so "bloody". Yum. :)

As we continued to communicate about her cake, it didn't look like a little rugby would feed the 70 people they were expecting at the dinner. So we decided to throw in a sheet cake made out of chocolate cake (to symbolize the dirt in rugby) and I would make it look like a rugby field.

Great. We're all set.

But wait!! Lori wanted the rugby ball to have the Milwaukee Rugby Club logo on it and she sent me some pictures. Now how was I going to do that?My first thought was to do a color flow logo and place that on top of the cake. Here's a picture of the logo that I covered in waxed paper.

Then I outlined everything in black.

And flowed in the white.

It looks okay now, I did two more, but the colors all bled together to form a mass of gray and it cracked...and it just wasn't going to work. I tried the process AGAIN and prevented the bleeding of the black, but it still didn't look the way I wanted it to. This cake had to look GREAT and I'm too much of a perfectionist.

So days later, I decided to just do the whole logo out of fondant. My wonderful husband, Danny, helped me with the lion-like creature in the logo and I put the rest together. But before you see the rugby ball, I'll talk about the rugby field. After putting down a crumb coat of green frosting, the first step was to outline the field lines in white.

Then I added the stars. This process took about an hour to cover the whole cake.

But it was worth it, because I think the frosting looks a lot like fuzzy grass here.

I added support in the cake and topped it with the finished rugby ball and added an additional border. I really think this cake turned out great and am so thankful Lori believed I could do it.

Today is Lori's wedding day. I wish her and her husband the very best!