Hey, stop stealing photos of my law school graduation cake with gavel - and no, that isn't a pipe on top. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

This cake was made for a man who was graduating from law school. This might look like a boring cake, but it was so much fun to make!  I learned so much attempting this one, but mostly I learned that I'll do a lot of things differently next time!  Cake was almond wedding cake, and each "book" was torted and laced with raspberry jam then filled with a whipped madagascar vanilla butter cream filling.  Everything is completely edible - even the gavel on top (hand molded from fondant).  The graduate's wife asked me if I could somehow incorporate his teachers' names into the cake - so I came up with the idea to make a "sticky" note on top of the books (made from yellow fondant).  I used edible markers on it.  One of the teachers left half-way through the semester, so I crossed out his name and scribbled the name of the new teacher beside it as an inside joke.  (Side note:  I found this cake pictured on someone else's cake website one day, just by accident, while browsing photos of cakes.  They were claiming it as their own!  I don't mean that she recreated my cake... I mean she actually used MY photograph of the cake I baked!  This one pictured right here!  I wasn't sure whether to laugh or pout.  She called it her "book and pipe cake" because she obviously couldn't tell my gavel was NOT a pipe.  I left a comment saying something like, "Hey!  This is MY cake!" and included my website.  The next day the photo was taken down.  Man, some people need to bake their own cakes and quit stealin' mine.  Also, why would anyone steal one of my crappy cakes when there are cake MASTERS out there to steal from?  Okay, side note over.)  I'm looking forward to trying this type of cake again soon, and hopefully, perfecting it.