I am looking for easy ideas for my daughter's birthday cake. She's having it at a local ranch. I am very new to decorating so any ideas are appreciated!!

TIA!

For a simple cake you could find a silhouette of a horse by searching online and print it onto paper and cut out the horse to make a stencil with the horse shape being the hole part (hopefully that description makes sense!), make the cake of the size you want, fill/ice it if you want then put the stencil on top and sprinkle icing (powdered) sugar or coca on top of the cake before carefully removing the paper stencil. Before putting the stencil on you could ice the top half of the cake in blue icing and the bottom half with green then put your horse on and it will be standing in a field. Leave the icing to set before you put the stencil on if you are doing that one. You could also add ready made sugar flowers to the field.

Alternatively you could make a cake and ice it green, adding some flowers if you wish and then add some miniature plastic horses like are sold for little childrens toy farms.

You could try a frozen buttercream transfer (FBCT). They're pretty easy and look great on a cake. Here are some instructions:

http://cakecentral.com/articles/73/how-to-create-a-frozen-buttercream-transfer

Check out my horse cake...it was for a woman who has horses and loves them....

I did a horse head cake for my daughters birthday one year, its in my photos, it was actually my very first cake. I found the instructions on parenting .com. they have the instructions and templates on how to cut each cake, it used a square and round cake. It was very easy for a first time cake. good luck.

I used a wilton pan for my horse head. It was really easy.

Here is one using the frozen buttercream transfer as mentioned above. I wrapped the base with a bandana "ribbon"
http://cakecentral.com/gallery/1644070