Spoiled Milk

My husband and I are starting a cake company next year and right now we are building our catalogue and practicing our cake skills as much as we can. So, when we first heard about the contest we thought it was a great opportunity to get cake inspiration. We chose this design because it was a real challenge: we had never done a carved cake and it involved lots of techniques. So we decided we wanted to go for it.
On day one, we went to the hardware store to get our supplies for the structure. On day two, we baked the cakes (my very moist cinnamon butter cake), did some patterns, put some fondant on the base and did the dollar bills and monocle out of gum paste and let that dry. On day three, we made some blue gelatin for the monocle, built the structure, protected it with white chocolate, made lots of italian meringue buttercream and stacked the cakes on the structure with it. We let that rest on the fridge overnight and the next day (day 4), we actually carved the cake (it was a lot less intimidating than it seemed to be), covered it with some more buttercream, covered the whole thing in modeling chocolate and started to decorate. On day 5 (I hope we can do things a little bit faster when we'll be in business, lol) we made the top part of the milk carton out of buttercream and cake scraps from the body. We covered that as well in modeling chocolate and decorated it, made the arms and legs out of modeling chocolate and put everything together.
We are very proud of our cake since it's our first 3D cake! We got to learn a lot and had some real fun doing it!