First of all hi to everyone, I am new to this forum and this is my first (of many!) post, I'm making my hubby a birthday cake soon and after racking my brains of a theme figured I would do a 2 tier cake featuring all of his favourite things about Hong Kong.
So my question is how can I do this and not risk ending up with just a mess of things all over the cake? I want it to look structured and not just one big dump of different stuff that has no real connection to each other? how can I tell a bit of a story with it??

Has any one else done a favourite things cake and how did you set about planning it?

Making the colors matching certainly helps in the structure. Don´t choose to many colors. It will bring some harmony.
Think about sizes. Have them all the same height. Or go ratio-wise.
Every thier an other theme.

Just some thoughts.

Thanks, that's a good idea about matching the colours, I think the temptation is just to add everything I can think of on it, but if I restrict it to the most meaningful things and keep a colour scheme hopefully it will be easier on the eye!

I might post up my design drafts for critiquing just to keep me on the straight and narrow!![/u]

Make both tiers hexagon then you can outline each square on the cake in a sort of picture frame and put one of his favorite things in each square.

Just thought I'd post an update on this thread, I managed to do the cake for my husband but due to time constraints I didnt start it until really late at night so I only had time for one tier and it wasnt as fancy as I planned but I am really pleased with it and think I prefer it to the one I had in my head!!! Its in my gallery if anyone wants to see it, http://cakecentral.com/gallery/2385779/favourite-things-cake

I took the idea for the photo frames and I think it worked really well so hopefully it looked co-ordinated and not too busy! Hubby loved it and that was the whole point!!!

Thanks for those who helped with ideas!!!