The colors in this picture don't do the cake justice, its much brighter and more colorful than it looks. Again, you can see how I used several borders to bring the cake together, and its still a very simple cake. There are piped acorns. I piped the leaves using a tip cut off of a paper bag with each color, drew a leaf design and then filled in with the correct color and used a spatula to smooth each leaf to the edges and then used a toothpick to draw the veins for each leaf, then I used a tiny tip 16 with brown icing and piped a small basket, then piped a light brown tip 9 for the nut.
One thing to remember when doing a fall color cake, is to mix your dark red icing first with enough brown icing to get the shade you want. Always remember when mixing these shades of colors, that they will deepen as they sit. Once you get your deep red or maroon color, mix your orange color icing and after its mixed well, take a SMALL amount from your red icing and add it to the orange, mix it well, then do your yellow and add a SMALL amount of the orange to it. This will blend all the colors together to help them match with each other.
I then mix a deep green, or jewel tone green and after making the bag, I paint one stripe each, of the red, orange, and yellow icing on the inside of the clean bag and then fill with the deep green. After closing the bag securely, take scissors and cut a V into the end of the tip and there you have your leaf bag ready.
These cakes above also show the use of deep purple with the fall colors and also the use of oranges, yellow, purple and turquoise together. When I first started doing cakes, I had a hard time with imagining various groups of colors, especially orange, with anything other than white or black. Also the ribbonwork stripe on the graduation cake was made with cookie cutters as designs, since it was for children. So you could use just about anything for the ribbonwork designs, just make up your own if you want to.
And of course your Halloween cakes.
