DS wants a spiderman birthday cake - I'm ok at the cake making bit but what about the top !! Help !

[herbgarden]

Should I try or should I try to buy one? They seem quite expensive to buy and I'd like to try.
Should I hire a tin?
What do I use for the icing?
Do I then get a picture and try to copy ?
I'm vaguely ok at cooking/craft things and it doesn't make me too nervous to have a go.

But I need help to get me started.
Thank you !!!

Give it a try, of course! I used normal icing and colouring (made it a light blue). Then got DS's spiderman's mask and pressed it into the icing. The icing came out through the eye holes, giving it a sort of 3D look. Then I coloured the icing that stuck out (shaped as the mask) in red and then decorated it with weblike lines. Not that difficult and looked pretty awesome.

Good luck!

You could have a spiderman image printed onto rice paper and then have that on the top of the cake. You can also have a personal message as well.

A friend did this with teletubbies and it worked really well. she used a supplier she found on Ebay.

Do they do a Spiderman version of those cake mixes for fairy cakes? If so, buy one and just use all the decorations on your birthday cake! Or buy a small Spiderman figure, decorate the cake with a simple web pattern and stick the figure on top. Your DS then gets an extra toy.

You can get a 'sheet' of red fondant icing - you just roll it out and put it over the top of the cake and shape it to fit. You could then ice a spiderweb design over it in black.

Ice in whatever colour you want. Get the icing pens from Tesco and draw on a spiderweb in black icing. Plop one of those spiderman plastic figures on the top.

Great ideas everyone - thanks so much - I feel inspired !.....but will give it a go.

You've probably had the party by now, but I did a spider-cake for my son one year. Home-made plain cake with jam/buttercream inside. Ready-roll red icing, then I painted on a black spider web with black food colouring paste. And made a spider for the centre from black icing - which creeped me out the more legs I added as I am scared of spiders. It looked good though.