I am *planning* on making my sons 2nd birthday cake. <fingers crossed> So I have been on this site every day trying to learn the ins an outs...question: fillings for the cake are they just favored icing to accompany the cake and can you use it to crumb coat the cake?? Is this making any sense?

There is a wide variety of fillings you can use... from fruits to buttercream Some people crumbcoat with buttercream and some use ganache.

it really depends on what filling you are using - i use buttercream both as a filling and crumbcoat - flavoured with chocolate, lemon , vanilla , etc and this is fine to use both as filling and crumb coat. i also use jam, lemon curd, caramel, etc as fillings as well as the buttercream but not as a crumb coat. i think buttercream or ganache are what most people use for crumb coating as you can control the consistency easily - more sticky fruity fillings are kept as fillings only. so for example you would fill a cake with jam and vanilla buttercream and then crumb coat with the buttercream only.

Hope this helps!!

I don't have much experience, for my first filling I used the same buttercreme icing that I was covering the cake with and mixed in some finely chopped strawberries and a tbsp of low sugar strawberry jam and everyone loved it!

That sounds yummy.