You guys rock! I really have to give you credit. Okay so how do you do it? I see so many wonderful carved cakes here and figured Iâd give it a try. It seems that the carved cakes here are flawless. Just by looking at the different pictures it doesnât seem that difficult to do. WRONG! Do you use special tools besides a serrated knife? I tried to make a small skull this weekend and it came out horrible! The carving really wasnât that bad itâs the proportions and knowing what and where to carve. OMG and then crumb coating â HELLO! What a mess. It took me about 5 hours to carve and frost the cake Saturday. Then I gave up. Put it in the fridge and left it alone until Sunday. Well It absolutely looked like a cartoon skull. I was so frustrated I cut the mouth out and re-carved it. It came out a little tiny bit better but nowhere close to what it should have looked like. I really need to work on carving!

What are your tricks to help me accomplish a reasonable looking carved cake?

Oh and the worst part is I showed the picture to a few people and they want a price so they can order one. How the heck do you price a carved cake? Is it basically charged by time spent? This cake cost me less than $7.00 for ingredients and supplies.

Iâm just so disappointed in myself. Thanks for listening!

I just use a serrated bread knife, nothing special...Just remember that when you ice the cake and/or put fondant on it will look bigger, so sometimes you have to adjust proportions on indented spots (like eye sockets) to be deeper when they're carved so that when you fill them in with icing they're still deep enough. As far as the proportions go, if you're not really good with drawing, you could start by getting pictures of the thing that you're going to be making and measure them to see how long one part should be in relation to another, etc. It helps to be able to draw but as long as you measure things and plan ahead it will be okay. Crumb coat first (that's the hard part usually) then refrigerate and let it set up and then ice it again. I don't freeze anything, but a lot of people will carve the cakes when they're frozen.