Cake ideas can include candy such as plain old M&M's and Hershey's Kisses for decorating cakes. However, you can purchase these candies for those special occasions, and they will definately make a conversation piece. When my husband and I celebrated our 25th anniversary, we ordered M&M's that said 'Daryl & Linda' on some and 'Happy 25th' on the others. We had chosen the colors of silver (or course) and light blue or light turquoise for our anniversary colors to work with for the celebration. (We also used gold and yellow M&M's for my parent's 50th Anniversary and purple and lavendar ones for our son's wedding.) Several months before our party, we had received an email advertising for personalized M&M's, and we thought that was just too unique of an idea to pass up. Checking the website now, they have more options available than they did almost 2 years ago – including 22 colors!  Our anniversary is April 10, so I was able to start picking up Christmas decorations on clearance in the right colors (silver  garland and bells and blue balls, etc.) that we wanted for decorating for the event. See some of the table decorations in the pictures below.

Another place that has some really cool ideas for candy that can be served with your decorated cake as a little garnish, or scattered on the tables as a colorful decoration, is a store called 'Candy Warehouse.' You deserve to check out this store. You can search for candy by the type, the occasion, and by color of it – or the wrapper. Another place you can shop for specialty candy and tons of party decorations is the Oriental Trading Company. They have all kinds of stuff that we used for our anniversary, including individually wrapped dinner mints in silver foil that had anniversary greetings printed on them and 25th anniversary balloons. And since Valentine's Day was only about two months prior to our anniversary, I was able to find the 'Love' tag Hershey's kisses. One thing the papers that came with the M & M's said was to not store them in a refrigerator, but rather keep them in a small styrofoam cooler, as getting chocolate cold makes it turn a whitish color – and then they wouldn't have been very pretty for the party and people would have thought we were serving them old candy . So as you can see, sometimes you can think 'outside the box' and come up with some really great options that will enhance or compliment your cake ideas.

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reat cake ideas can produce great results. Sometimes we invent those ideas in a 2-D effect rather than in 3-D. Basically it's like drawing a picture on a cake. That is where the edible image frosting sheets are so wonderful. Cake ideas have changed over the last few years with the introduction of these edible image frosting sheets. To think you can make decorated cakes with a thin sheet of frosting that has been run through a printer after generating the image on a computer is awesome! After decorating cakes the traditional, time-consuming way, we were ready to make the transition with eagerness. We researched the possibilities and found all we needed to get started was the necessary printer that would accomodate the frosting sheets. It had to be a new printer of a certain brand and model that had never had regular ink run through it. Then all we had to purchase was the food coloring ink cartridges and the edible image frosting sheets. It was not a bad investment at all for what we could now produce with much less time and effort.

This is a sample of what can be done with edible image cakes. This particular one was made for mine and my husband's 25th wedding anniversary. The program allows you to put your own photos on the edible frosting sheet that is designed on the computer and printed off. We will be posting other pictures regularly so you can see the possibilities with this way of decorating. We do know that with the edible image frosting sheets and all the possibilities, you can set to flow freely your cake ideas.