Beach Birthday Cake - A Decorating Tutorial

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.

A 2 tier blue beach themed birthday cake with colorful fondant surfboards, and an orange hibiscus topper

A fun and cheerful beach birthday cake

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.

As you can see, there is quite a lot going on the cake, and I have created separate tutorials for each of them. For the 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 surfboards and another tutorial on how to make the gum paste hibiscus flower.

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

How to Make a 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. 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 to cover the entire cake and white for the 3d letters on the cake.
Sea waves - I used 2 different types 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.

Assembling the cake:

The waves on 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 them and attached them to the cake.

A 2 tier light blue cake with sea waves fondant borders

A 2 tier cake covered in blue as the base for the beach birthday cake

Adding the surfboards

For the surfboards, 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.

A 2 tier light blue cake with sea waves border and a yellow and an orange surfboard on the sides of each tier.

Adding pretty surfboards onto the sides of the beach birthday cake

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

Using a small brush to brush a coiled blue fondant strip

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

Using food coloring bottles to support the deco on a blue cake

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

Decorating the cake board with edible sand

Next was the cake board. I attached a light blue satin ribbon around my cake board. And then I topped it with brown sugar 'sand'.

Cake board covered in brown sugar. Cake is covered in blue fondant and there is a yellow fondant surfboard deco on the side.

Cake board covered in brown sugar sand for a truly beach effect for the beach birthday cake

The birthday girl's name

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 surfboards and an orange hibiscus flowers.

Orange gum paste hibiscus as a topper on a blue cake. In the back are 2 fondant surfboards in blue and maroon

The gum paste hibiscus

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.