Bad pics of Good cakes, part 1

I have always enjoyed making and trying to decorate cakes. However it is only recently that I started to take it seriously. The cake that got me thinking was a cake my best friend asked me to make for her father's birthday. And yes, it was a humorous birthday, not a funeral, or post-mortem. The skull and crossbones at the tiop is a clay piece that my friend made for it.

So I went off in search of a Wilton class. While there, I picked up the basics, which in my opinion, is all you really need to make a nice looking cake ... well, imagination is pretty essential as well. However I really have no desire to make the huge and insane flower baskets, and most of the rest of the 'advanced' stuff can be done using skills from other baking projects. If you have ever covered a pie with a crust, you can roll fondant and cover a cake with it. I can make other sorts of decorations with Candy Clay, which you can do if you have ever played with Play-Doh. The final cake of the class was done around Halloween, and I submitted the following train wreck. And it was a wreck on purpose, it was Halloween! I couldn't make some flowery happy cake on Halloween! Yes, the clown rolled over the mime with a lawnmower ... the rose was on there only because it was required to show we could do it.

I also made a cake, just for the heck of it, for my husbands weekly geek gathering of Dungeons and Dragons. I had the idea all in my head, and it came out surprisingly close. I made brownie pop ghosts and pumpkins first, they are dipped in melted candy. It was my first time trying to do dips, so while they came out rough, I wasn't overly disappointed. The skull and headstone were sugar cookies with royal icing, and the rest was just regular icing with different tips. The boys really loved it, and with the exception of the popsicle stick on the left, everything was edible. The bones and spider legs were just candy coated pretzel sticks.