X Congratulations Cake

Today my brother received his X-Ring for university! This ring is recognized around the world, and consists of a golden square with a big black X in the middle. Of course I had to make a cake to celebrate, and I wanted to make a cake to represent the X ring. The main issue was, that gold and black are difficult icing colors to achieve. It was my father who came up with the idea of not icing the part of the cake that would be the ring, since the cake was already a nice golden color. I used blue for the outline of the ring and the X because blue is one of the university's colors. It should technically be more of a darker blue, but again I did not want to use too much food dye, and this blue looks quite nice I think. To make this cake, I began with a 9x13 inch rectangular golden cake. I cut out a square and two triangles from pieces of foil, and laid them out on the cake to resemble a ring. Then I iced around the foil and down the sides of the cake in white buttercream. Since the cake was so moist, it would have been easier to flip the cake and ice the bottom, however the bottom did not have the same nice golden color as the top. So I had to do a crumb coat, and then a final coat of white icing. Once the white was done, I carefully peeled off the foil, only to discover that some of the top moist layer of the cake peeled off along with it. It looked pretty bad speckled like that, so I grabbed some more foil and peeled off the rest of the layer. This exposed a nice yellow cake, that actually worked a bit better than the top layer. I then outlined the ring in blue buttercream using a basketweave tip turned upside down. I piped a thick X in the middle. I wrote 2013 on either side of the ring band. Then I wrote a congratulations on the top in blue, and of course a smiley face. 
The design itself was quite easy to do, and didn't take me very long at all. The most difficult part was cutting out the templates for the ring and getting just the right sizes. Icing around the foil actually was not tricky at all, and the foil kept the golden ring completely bare.
A big congratulations to my brother on his great achievement!