You may already know that the teddy bear was named for Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States. But are you familiar with the story? “The name originated from an incident on a 1902 bear hunting trip. There were several other hunters competing, and most of them had already killed an animal. A suite of Roosevelt’s attendants cornered, clubbed, and tied a black bear to a willow tree. They called Roosevelt to the site and suggested that he shoot it. He refused to shoot the bear himself, deeming this unsportsmanlike, but instructed that the bear be killed to put it out of its misery. It became the topic of a political cartoon by Clifford Berryman in The Washington Post.
Morris Michtom saw the drawing and was inspired to create a tiny soft bear cub. He put it in his shop window with a sign “Teddy’s bear,” after sending a bear to Roosevelt and receiving permission to use his name. The toys were an immediate success” (Wikipedia).
OK, interesting. All cake assignments should come with a history lesson, but one burning question remained: how to create bear fur? It seemed obvious that I needed to use light brown sugar and simply cover the entire cake with a light dusting. But wait. How do you convince sugar crystals to adhere to a vertical surface? After some mulling, I came up with nothing. I started by coating the entire bear in buttercream so the sugar would have something to stick to. (It was also useful in covering the dark brown chocolate cake, which you can see was only partly successful.)
In the end I simply threw sugar at the cake until enough just stuck. Perhaps not the most elegant solution. The floor didn’t thank me for it either.
And that is why this particular bear is wearing a shirt that covers his entire torso, in case you wondered.
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