Save money on cake decorating

Have a special event coming up? Like a special cake but can't justify paying $35 plus from a cake shop? Here are my tips...
1. If you don't want to bake and decorate the cake yourself, ask someone else to do it. I made a cake for the South Australian Moke Club's 40th birthday on Saturday. There were 56 people there and the cake cost less than $20 to make and decorate. However, it did take time to do it. Alternatively, you can buy an un-iced cake and just do the decorations.
2. If you have the time and the inclination, bake and decorate the cake yourself. I wasn't very good at making icing until I bought the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book. The trick to good icing is to beat the butter for quite a while, until it turns white. Using lollies (sweets) as decorations is especially handy if you are not good at using (or don't have) a piping bag with attachments.
3. Buttercake recipes are most likely to please everybody and are easy to make for the novice baker. Not everyone likes chocolate or fruit cakes. You can jazz up a buttercake by adding a layer of jam and cream between the layers of cake. The Moke Club cake I made had two layers of cake (the equivalent of 4 quantities of my buttercake recipe and I used my lamington tray to cook them in). I used my home made jam with whipped cream in between the layers of cake.
4. Cook the cake(s) the day before as day old cakes are easier to ice and decorate, especially if you are cutting shapes out of the cake (see my Hickory Dickory Clock cakes and "Bay to Birdwood" car cakes that I made for my son's 2nd birthday).