Thanks for your help guys! I tried adding the ambient light (which I then pre-comped so it wouldn’t light “Caucee” as well) but that actually didn’t seem to separate the front plane from the extruded sides. It just turned it into one big blob of blue.
I checked the reflection settings and they indeed match one another.
Next I copied the materials section from “caucee” and pasted to the bottom layer—that didn’t seem to do anything at all.
Lastly (and I don’t know how I didn’t think of this from the very beginning) I just duplicated the “caucee” layer and changed the type. Voila!
I still wish I had some idea why it wasn’t working correctly, but at least I got my end result. Thanks for taking the time to help out! It was greatly appreciated!