I'm making this cake for my brother in law's birthday tonight. It's supposed to be a steel drum. He wanted chocolate frosting, which I darkened up. I need to know if there's anything I can do to make this cake more appealing. To me, it just looks like a poop colored bowl. Any suggestions???? I only use buttercream, so that limits me somewhat.

I would put in a filling of some sort - perhaps chocolate pudding, cut about an inch off the bottom and place it on the top to cover the pudding, then ice.
I would put large marshmallows on the sticks also as the scale does not look right.
on the Earlene Moore website there is a picture of a grooms cake like a drum, use that as your guide. OK? Hope this helps!

Thanks for helping out puncess, but I don't really understand your suggestion A steel drum is not like a regular drum. It looks like an inverted turtle shell, for lack of a better description. The drums on Earlene Moore's site are regular snare drums.

The actual shape of this cake is similar to a steel drum, it just doesn't look appealing. I'm wondering if there's anything i can do, barring starting over, to make it look better.

Again, thanks for helping!

When I googled it(I didn't really know what a steel drum was) this is the results:

http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient&aq=steel%20drums&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLR,GGLR:2006-18,GGLR:en&q=steel+drums&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

I like the way it looks. Maybe you can do a silver/grey line(tip 5) outlining the top outer egde?

Do you have some luster dust??? Maybe where he hits the drum you could put some gold or silver luster dust. On a kettle drum, it has marks where the drum is struck. Am I making sense?

But you cake does look like a kettle drum. You did a great job! I do agree your marshmellows should be bigger.