I am making a cake for a 90-year-old's birthday party. One of the many requested themes was having her family represented on the smallish cake. There are 15 total, so I chose to do it like mini family portraits to fit them in without squishing them. Clearly, this is a work in progress, but am I crazy to kind of like how they look without faces? Now I'm afraid if I put faces on them, it will look too cartoony. (this is one tier of two - the other is travel-related). Thoughts?

Instead of faces, how about a family tree. You can put their names, and indicate relationship to her by their location on the tree.

Do you have a pic of it so far?

If you are doing something to identify them -- e.g. golf club for a golfer, then you don't really need faces. Or do you mean you have some generic looking families on there? If the numbers are right, I bet people will be picking out which one is them, even if you didn't specifically mean for the figures/pictures to be a specific person. Whenever we see family stuff, the smallest is our baby, the biggest is daddy, red hair is one kid, brown hair is another kid, etc etc.