A Rehearsal Dinner Cake for a Pair of Teachers

A couple of sweet readers and fellow bloggers, Madeline and Rosie to be exact, have expressed interest in the rehearsal dinner cake I made for son #2 and his bride.  They've stopped by here often enough to know that this is something I always do for my boys. 

I decided to use the fact that the two wonderful kids who got married last Saturday are both teachers--my son teaches high school math, and his new wife is a kindergarten teacher--as inspiration for the theme for the cake.  Also, my son has become the adopted father of Ginger's beloved black pug, Reagan, so I wanted to incorporate him into the design as well.  (And yes, the Reagan he's named after is Ronald Reagan, who in this woman's opinion is the greatest US president of the modern era; so as if there aren't already a million reasons why this girl is the perfect match for our conservative-minded son, there's another one.)

Sometimes, I break down and buy ready-to-use tubes of colored frosting, even though they just never taste as good as my awesome homemade buttercream.  When I made the Manchester United cake for my sister's son's rehearsal dinner back in September, I used black frosting from a tube; and not only was it hard to squeeze and control, but it also turned your teeth gray-ish if you ate it.

So I decided to be a purist for this cake and mix up my own decorating colors, going with chocolate for the areas that would otherwise have been black.  The only problem was that my chocolate frosting tended to get very melty as I worked with it, and therefore when I tried to spell out "SCHOOL BUS," I almost made a total mess of the whole thing.  I ended up having to scrape off the word "SCHOOL," and then I spelled out the much shorter, much sweeter word "BUS."  Good enough, I thought.

My son is not only a high school teacher, but he's also a football coach, so I added plastic football embellishments in lieu of a decorative frosting border.

I made this two--layer cake in NH, boxed it up, and put it in the freezer, so that it would be frozen solid for the car trip down to VA.  This is what I've done for every wedding so far, and it works like a charm.  The cake is less fragile in its frozen state, and by the time we reach our destination, it's all thawed out.  Then by the time the rehearsal dinner comes, it's moist and heavenly.  This cake did have a near-catastrophe befall it, when a rolled-up extension cord fell over onto the box, just after we'd arrived in VA.  So a chunk of icing just under the wheels of the bus (which go round and round) was scraped off.  But I did some surgical work on it, and patched it up so that you can hardly notice.

Okay then, here it is.  For a pair of teachers, doesn't this design just take the cake?

The couple, God bless them, were happy with the way this cake turned out.  In a way, I think it looks like something one of Ginger's kindergarten students might draw.  But I guess that makes it just about perfect, doesn't it?