Decorate a Cake (no icing bag required)

I have become the celebratory cake baker around here and try to come up with some creative ways to decorate without artificially colored icing.  Here are some ideas:

 Here is the dinosaur cake from my daughters recent 4 year old birthday.  It's a chocolate beet cake covered in 72% chocolate.  I baked this one in a spring form pan, when it was still hot I removed the pan and place squares of chocolate directly on the cake and they melt.  Just spread that delicious melted dark chocolate around and instant chocolate shell.  I added yogurt raisins, to the melted chocolate for Flintstones-esque rocky accents and a $1 T-Rex figurine.  The foliage is from my daughters play food (plastic cherry stems and scallion greens).

This was a lemon cake that I baked for well...Doug.  Thin slices of lemon fashioned into letters and placed in the lemon yogurt/cream cheese icing.

A going away Amaretto Apricot Butter cake for Anna and Davis.  I used some white paper board that came out of some kind of food packaging.  Using my daughters markers I drew and cut out the words and taped them to three bamboo skewers.  By the way apricots simmered in Amaretto are absolutely delicious.

photo by Anna Wa

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