I'm doing the farewell cake for a local school's end of year party, and their theme is black, gold and silver.

I would ideally like to do a black cake with gold and silver decorations but I'm a little worried about stained mouths as I'll be using buttercream. So my questions for a black cake are:
- Will it be easier to make chocolate icing and tint it black, OR
- Will it be easier to make chocolate icing, frost the cake and then spray paint it black?

OR

If instead I wanted to do a cake with silver icing, how would I do that? Is it possible? I've only seen metallic finishes on the accents of a cake, not as the whole cake's colour

If I were doing a black cake I'd cover the buttercream in black fondant - easier to cut/peel off at serving. Nobody wants to actually eat black icing do they?

I think you can buy silver spray for airbrushing...Post a pic of your cake I have thought about a silver and black cake too but wasn't sure how to do the icing.

I did a cake gold once, didn't post it as I didn't personally like it (not the gold the rest of the design it just wasn't me) but the gold worked really well. I covered the cake in white fondant let it harden up a bit over night and then took a deep gold lustre dust and rubbed it in with some paper towel. dry dust no vodka or anything and it made a it gold shiny cake. I'm going to try and post a picture so you can see. Oh and If it works the cat is supposed to have one eye it was made to look like the womans cat.

K that didn't work so I just uploaded the pic. I've also used black fondant on one of my cakes one of the recent ones in my photos and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be for taste etc. Much easier I think to cover with a black fondant and as coral said they can just take it off if they dont want it, I think it would save you a lot of headaches. There's the pic of the gold anyway HTH Han xx
http://cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1848328&done=1

Black fondant is what I would do....much easier and a time saver too.