Food photography is harder than it looks

What better inaugural post for my blog than the completion of my cake decorating class, culminating in these cakes for Adam's birthday?
The cake recipe is from the back of the Hershey's cocoa box, so I won't bother to post it here, but I will credit my friend Rachel with introducing me to the recipe. Wonderful, chocolatey, easy to make pareve (just use soy milk), and equally happy in pans of different shapes and sizes, as you can see by the mini cake (top, Hebrew) and regular-size cake (middle).
I like to fill the cake with a generous helping of raspberry jam between the layers. The frosting is a chocolate ganache. The question is, of course, was the improvement in my cake-decorating skills worth spending four Wednesday nights spent in a middle-school classroom in cake decorating class. To answer that question, check out last year's cake, bottom. (If anyone knows how to make blogger post the images right-side up and in the text, let me know!)
Some differences you can't see: this year, the decorating frosting is homemade raspberry buttercream, a big taste improvement over last year's purchased tubes. Other innovations, since my photography is dreadful, include whipping the ganache into frosting and using it to frost the sides of the cake, resulting in a smoother finish. I do think that the writing is better -- real buttercream is much easier to work with than the tubes -- and obviously, I didn't know how to make a puppy out of frosting until I took this class. But mostly I think that the class's value was not in the techniques learned but in the fact that it pushed me to go out and buy proper decorating equipment, and practice with the pastry bag until I reached a minimal level of comfort with it. I'm sure my next cake will be more polished, but I'm pretty pleased with these. Especially served at the end of a meal that included Arugala and Nectarine Salad, Lentil-Barley Soup, Polenta with Kale-Tomato Sauce and Cheese, of my own creation, and roasted acorn squash. I only wish it hadn't been Shabbat so I could've taken a picture of the plate. And most important of all, the birthday boy liked it, too.

PS My apologies for the messed up photos. If anyone knows how to place images throughout the post and prevent them from rotating themselves in strange ways, please let me know!