I am making a cake for a family dinner Friday night, so I will have very little time to decorate, since I will be doing all the baking and decorating during the week. They have requested chocolate frosting, and I can't bring myself to use the canned kind. I'm going to try the chocolate syrup frosting that I've read good things about here at CC. The cake will be half vanilla, half chocolate with raspberry filling.

So...finally my question: Since I will be in such a time crunch, after baking and making the chocolate frosting, I won't have the time or energy to make any buttercream to color to do a lot of decorations. Not a huge deal since this is for family, but I'd rather not bring a plain frosted chocolate cake. They got kind of spoiled with decorated cakes all summer! Does anyone have any pics of cakes they decorated using all chocolate frosting, or any ideas? Is it even possible?

As always, thank you so much for your generous help!

I made a chocolate frosted cake and just used a cake comb to decorate the sides..then sprinkled chopped pecans on the top. It needed a bottom border so I just sort of "pushed" the pecan pieces into the icing for the border. I thought it was very plain but everyone raved about it........

hope this helps.

When you are making the icing you can always pull some out before you add chocolate or more chocolate to it. That away you would either have white or a lighter shade of brown to work with. I'd do something simple, swirls or dots.

Also if you have time at the beginning of the week you could make a color flow piece, chocolate transfer, FBCT or even some royal icing flowers to use as decoration. Since we are creeping into fall what about some fondant leaves?

OK, it's done. I took the easy way out and went for simplicity, but I like how it turned out. The cake is 1/2 chocolate, 1/2 vanilla with raspberry filling. The frosting is the chocolate syrup frosting from this site. This was my first time making the frosting and doctoring a cake mix. Can't wait to cut into it tomorrow night!

Your cake looks delicious! I will have to try that chocolate syrup frosting since it looks so pretty on your cake. Let us know how it tastes!