Michigan Tailgate Cake: Under the Lights II
This past Saturday Michigan played Notre Dame in Under the Lights II. Two years ago, Michigan Football had their first ever night game where they played Notre Dame in a game called Under the Lights. For that game I recreated the logo for the tailgate so I thought that I would do the same thing with the new logo for this game's tailgate cake.
I made a two layer chocolate buttermilk cake and iced it with buttercream icing. To recreate the logo I printed a copy of it scaled to fit the top of the cake. I then cut out the elements and traced around them on rolled out marshmallow fondant.
The letters were too small and difficult to do like that so I cut a rectangle shape that was the size of each of the letters and then free hand cut each letter from the rectangle. This made sure that they were all the correct height and width. I am not going to lie, this was pretty time consuming but in the end I think it turned out really cool and was worth the effort.
Frank made food poking fun at Notre Dame including chicken hash (since Michigan's head coach Brady Hoke said that Notre Dame was chicken for backing out of the annual match up after next year) and fried catfish sandwiches (in reference to former Notre Dame star Manti Te'o getting catfished last year).
Frank started tailgating by 8 am which meant that he was out there for twelve hours before the game. I felt that showing up in the afternoon for five hours of tailgating was more than sufficient. As always we had a lot of fun, hanging out and of course eating.
The game had an 8 pm kickoff but before the game Michigan Football legend, Tom Harmon, was honored. After a video highlight film his son, Mark Harmon (of NCIS fame), spoke as they added a legends patch to the 98 jersey that Tom Harmon wore.
The sun had just set when the team entered the field. During the first half Michigan was pretty dominant not allowing Notre Dame to get a first down on their first two possessions and ending the half up by two touchdowns.
Throughout the game during timeouts different Michigan sporting figures were recognized including the 2012-13 basketball team that made it to the National Championship game in April and 1960s basketball star, Cazzie Russell.
At halftime the Michigan Marching band performed a medley of Beyonce's songs with a video message from her prior to them taking the field. Before the game blue LED wrist bands had been passed out to fans so when they dimmed the lights for the halftime show it was cool to see the pinpoints of blue light throughout the stadium.
The second half was a little tough to watch as Michigan made some errors that looked like they were trying to give the game back to Notre Dame. In the end, however, the team pulled out a 41-30 win over Notre Dame.
It was a very long but fun day. Luckily next week the kickoff against Akron is at noon!
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 8:43AM | Posted by Lisa | 3 Comments | Share Article | Email Article | Print Article 
Reader Comments (3)
I never knew what efforts were made for tailgating - I always thought it was just a basket picnic out of the back of a car. Frank has given new, tastier meaning to tailgating :-) Your cake efforts are amazing. The Michigan team should honour your dedication.
Thank you, Mary-Lou! Most people are more laid back about tailgating, but Frank likes to take it to another level!
I was at both of the Under the Lights games at UofM (and the last game in 2014 in South Bend) - Heartbreak followed by redemption as I am a third generation Irish fan. Two things in comment to your blog post, which I cam across in a somewhat random manner having searched "LED stadium lighting Notre Dame" (researching the recent #NDBiggerThanBrick posts), first... Some of the most amazing college football environments I've personally experienced were those two games in the upgraded Big House. Despite my allegiance to the Golden Domers, I really appreciated the Desmond Howard and Tom Harmon tributes as well as the half time theatrics and overall environment (and fans were class-acts to my family and I throughout. That was a contrast to the chicken dance stunt); And second point: that tailgate cake with the Under The Lights logo looks super cool. Nice work! I know that must have taken time and talent. Cheers! Glad the rivalry gets a renewal now that UofM should be a perennial power-- once again-- and I'm hoping ND can be back on track enough to make it competitive come 2018. I look forward to reading those posts when it happens and if you're still posting. Until then, best of luck and Go Irish!