On top of old smoky...

I think I'm going to start calling our cake "Old Smoky." For no reason other than it's a classic song and a classic tradition that my Mom would not hear of eliminating. We're actually going to have a small-ish cake for reasons that I'll talk about later, but in the meantime, I have to find something to put on top of it. I wanted something cool and sweet, not just flowers but not a monogram (because I haven't decided on the name change issue) either.

This was my original inspiration and the first picture relating to cakes that I saved on my computer:

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I love chocolate, this was totally different than what I've seen around, and it looks really elegant. Even the flowers are made of chocolate! And I could totally find a mold and do it myself. The layer that is surrounded by the chocolate ring (see? symbolism) is actually styrofoam on this cake, just FYI.

And of course, Ann Wood's little birds had me at hello:

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But since our cake is small and not a showcase piece (really it's existence is for my mom to have some cake cutting pictures) I felt like spending almost $300 on them didn't make sense.

I LOVED this one, but since we're not doing fondant it wouldn't be as clean:

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And last but certainly not least (Mrs. Poodle put this in one of her entries):

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But... okay, here comes the embarrassing part. Mr. KM and I have these totally dorky nicknames for each other. I won't tell you who is who, but we are slothy and gator:

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I searched in vain for a cuter sloth and gator, but these plastic animals are the closest I could find. Ideally, I'd like to find them in the same ceramic material that my owl is made of (yes, he's the tackiest thing ever, but I LOVE him) just so it would be... classier.

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I'm considering putting out an Etsy Alchemy bid out there to see if someone can do it, but I don't know how hard that process is. Any idea? Anyone know how to make ceramics? Anyone have any luck with an Alchemy bid having to do with ceramics?