Lion Cake

I'm trying to find any reason to practice new techniques I read about or try my hand at something new. We are invited to a friend's house for dinner and it will be on the first day of March. March "comes in like Lion and out like a Lamb", so I decided to do a lion cake.

Of course, I ran out of frosting so the mane isn't complete. It's too low and limpy. There should also be some hair between the head and the ears to give a full mane look. And it looks kind of lopsided AND I had trouble with the cut cake crumbling as I frosted it. I even put it in the freezer for about an hour, but that didn't seem to be long enough.

Overall it's not too bad for my first attempt at "piping". This one will taste better than the other one. It's a fudge cake (still using a mix as I'm not ready to embark on learning to bake cakes from scratch just yet) with buttercream frosting. I had planned to put fudge pudding and rasberries in the middle. However, I forgot that the face doesn't cover the entire top layer... so it didn't work out. I tried the leftovers (the cut parts of the cake not used) with the sugar-free fudge pudding and some rasberries... it was really good. So, the final cake will taste ok.. just kind of boring.