Beach Birthday Cake

This beach birthday cake was a really fun one to make. I designed it to suit the liking of an 18 years old teenager with fun and bright colors, surf boards and sandy beach effect.

The cake was not really that difficult or complicated to make. Some of the elements on the cake were made in advance so that really helped in speeding up the time spent on assembling the cake together.

As you can see, there is quite alot going on the cake, and I have create separated tutorials for each of them. For the fondant waves, I have 2 different tutorials, one for the 2D ones and another for the 3D waves. I also have a tutorial for all the 4 surf boards and another tutorial on how to make the gumpaste hibiscus flower.

This tutorial is to explain the steps I took in assembling the whole cake together.

Here is how I assembled this Beach Birthday Cake:

These were the main components of the beach birthday cake:

Cake - This was a two tier cake measuring 6 inches and 9 inches in diameter.The bottom tier is baked using my butter pound cake recipe while the top tier is my chocolate cake recipe. Each tier was 6 inches high and if you intend to make the cake in the same height as mine, you would need to multiply my recipes by 1.5 times for the 6 inches round and 9 inches round cake pans.

Buttercream - I used buttercream to crumb coat the cake as well as to fill the cake layers. I used vanilla variation to fill the bottom tier and chocolate buttercream for the top tier.

Fondant - I used Satin Ice Baby Blue fondant to cover the entire cake and white fondant for the 3d letters on the cake.

Sea waves - I used 2 different waves on this cake. See how I made the 2D ones here and the 3D ones here.

Gumpaste hibiscus - This was handmade in white and dusted in orange petal dust. See how I made the flower here.

Fondant surfboards - These were really fun to make. See the tutorial here.

3D upright standing alphabets - These were used to put up the birthday girl's name. I have a separate tutorial on how to make such letting on cakes. Click here for the full tutorial.

Brown sugar - The sand on the cake board was actually brown sugar.

Shortening and fondant glue - these were the glues for this project.

Cling wrap to wrap the hibiscus floral wire.

And this was how I assembled the cake:

Once the cakes were baked and cooled, I leveled, filled and crumb coated them separately. And then I covered each with baby blue Satin Ice fondant and stacked them up.

Next were the 2D ocean waves. Click here or the image below to see how I made the waves and attached them to the cake.

Once the waves were in place, I attached 2 of the surfboards onto the sides of the cake as shown. I used shortening to hold them in place on the cake.

After that, I attached the 3D fondant waves on both tiers. I used fondant glue for these waves as they were quite heavy and needed something stronger to hold them securely in place.

And while waiting for the fondant glue to really set, I used the support of my food coloring bottles to hold the waves in place.

Click here for a full tutorial on how I made these waves and how I attached them to the cake.

Once the waves were all intact, I added attached a light blue satin ribbon around my cake board and then filled the cake board with brown sugar 'sand'.

Next to go on the cake was the birthday girl's name. I used fondant glue to attach the letters onto the cake.

And finally, I put the cake toppers on, i.e. the other 2 fondant surfboards and an orange hibiscus flowers.

The hibiscus flower was originally white and I dusted it with orange petal dust. And before inserting the flower into the cake, I wrapped the wire with cling plastic so that the wire does not come into contact with the cake.