Another day, another cake.

This weekend we celebrated our daughters 11th birthday. Her only request for her cake was that it be a chocolate cake with vanilla icing. We've had a lot of chocolate cake lately and I think that every one's getting tired of it. After I baked the cake and iced it (I totally cheated and used a store bought icing and a box cake mix) I felt that it looked a little plain and boring. Then I had the brilliant (not!) idea to try my "new to me" design with a couple of different icing colors. Jayna is a very girly-girl and loves all things pink and purple so I figured that I'd use those two colors to decorate the cake. Unfortunately, since I was using a whipped store bought icing it was very thin and didn't want to hold it's shape very well when I was trying to make the loops and squiggles on the side(s) of the cake. When Jayna saw it for the first time she said that it was beautiful and that she loved it, so my mission was accomplished. I personally wasn't happy with it because of the issues with the icing but it still looked presentable.

My latest issue that I'm having with my cakes is that even after I level the tops I still can't get them to stay flat once I start putting icing on them. Any suggestions, tips, etc to prevent having the top and sides be unevenly iced?