FarmVille cakes!

Looks like the trend of paying homage to your favorite game in dessert form continues. FarmVille recently held a contest and these 15 confections took the grand prize, which was 1,000 Farm Cash and 1 million coins. Not too shabby, eh? Kinda makes you want to see what you can do with a little flour and sugar.

farmville funhouseMy absolute favorite among the winners is this Fun House cake from HDGurl (based on the FarmVille funhouse item to the right) and she says that, yes, every bit of this cake is edible and no fondant or sugar paste was used in the construction.

    "This cake was created in about 20-30 hours over the course of several days, and used approximately 4 lbs of modeling chocolate, making it fantastically delicious, and entirely eatable!

    ...This cake was near impossible to scale because of the lack of pictures with any angles, this was obviously because it is not a real structure. I think the challenge of that simple fact made the Fun House the obvious choice to create.

    The "base" of this cake is two home-baked 9X13 chocolate fudge cakes, filled with chocolate raspberry mousse. The top 3D structures are made of rice krispy treats and melted chocolate chips as "glue".

    Every figure was hand sculpted out of modeling chocolate (mixture of basically chocolate and corn syrup), & rice crispies... and the Caramel Apples have... of course... CARAMEL on them! Support for the signs, and barn were wooden skewers."

Also, a hats off to the 'Falling Leaves' cupcakes by Monica Groeger, the 'Gnome' cupcakes by mommagoes and the 'Happy Thanksgiving??' cake, by Silver Kathy, with a pig, sheep and cow sitting down at a feast. To see these FarmVille-themed sweets and more, click through the gallery below.

Gree's OpenFeint hires ex-Glu Mobile exec, more social games coming?

The mobile social game wars are heating up, as OpenFeint just took on former Glu Mobile executive Sarah Thompson (pictured) as its director of developer relations, SocialTimes reports. In other words, OpenFeint, owned by Japanese mobile social gaming powerhouse Gree, hired Thomson to strategically acquire build relationships with independent developers.

Namely, SocialTimes's Azam Khan guesses those developers will be primarily social and mobile social game creators, given Thomson's past exploits in the industry with Glu Mobile and IUGO Entertainment before that. And frankly, we couldn't agree more. Considering OpenFeint is a social network for mobile games at heart, and Gree's existing status, it simply makes sense.

"OpenFeint is going through an exciting phase of growth right now and Sarah is exactly the kind of person we need to keep up the momentum," OpenFeint SVP Marketing and Developer Relations Eros Resmini said in a release. "Sarah's deep history in mobile gaming paired with her connections to the developer community made her a great fit for OpenFeint."

We can't help but recall what just went down between OpenFeint and Gree: The former's co-founder and CEO Jason Citron resigned, and Gree CFO Naoki Aoyagi took his place. (Though, VentureBeat reckons the move was less ... cut-and-dry.) But back to Gree and OpenFeint's future plans, the simple fact is mobile social games are growing at an exponential rate on iOS and Android devices.

"I've always admired OpenFeint for its constant innovation in the mobile gaming space," Thomson said in a release. "As the company continues to change with the market, I'm excited to help OpenFeint continue growing." And we think we have an idea of just where Thomson would like to go. It starts with an "S" and--oh, forget it. You get the point already.

Do you think this puts OpenFeint in a better place to compete with opponents like DeNA and Zynga in mobile games? Don't you wish you could have rockin' tattoos and a big time exec gig? Sound off in the comments. 3 Comments