The Trick to a Jaw-Dropping Birthday Cake

Or dinosaurs with party hats. Thank you for the inspiration.

As kids in Australia in the 80s and 90s it was de rigor that everyone had a copy of the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake book and the tradition was you got to fawn through it in the lead up to your birthday to decide which cake you wanted/hoped your parents would make (often with parents gently nudging towards some of the less.challenging spectacles!). I now have a copy amd my almost 4 year old LOVES looking at it any time of year to choose cakes or guess which ones his grandparents might like. It’s such a nostalgic, I love that he is keeping the tradition going. (The Bluey episode Duck Cake is all about a cake from this book!) https://www.womensweeklyfood.com.au/baking/australian-womens-weekly-childrens-birthday-cakes-29679/

I didn’t read all of the comments, so apologies if this is redundant, but this one’s for all the construction loving kids out there! Bake a simple box chocolate cake, rip about a 1/3 of it off from the end and pile it on the other side. Leave the crumbly edge exposed. Cover in chocolate frosting and maybe even some green for grass. Place a bunch of small construction toys around like it’s a work site. Orange cone candles pair well. It can look like a hot mess and kids LOVE this cake. Plus, I love how easy it is to make and how the less perfect it looks, the better!

Just last month I topped a grocery-store-ordered chocolate cake, on which they’d beautifully written happy birthday to my five year old, with inverted waffle cones dipped in chocolate and decorated with dyed-red white chocolate spills. A volcano cake, ladies and gentlemen! First time I’ve ordered a grocery store cake instead of making the cake myself and first time there was nary a slice left. And the birthday boy and I got to do the fun part–the decorating–together. :)

Reading this post the past several days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my cousin’s family. Over the many years and many kids in their family, they’ve done a spontaneous, fun “cake” idea. Take chocolate Tasty Cake cupcakes or any flavor, pile them up on a plate in a round mound, pyramid fashion. Stick candles in some of them to sing. Kids then just grab a tasty cake cupcake. Out here on West Coast, no Tasty Cakes, ha, but the hostess cupcakes with the white icing squiggle are adorable. They have a limited flavor out now I’ve been eating; pink icing, iconic white squiggle and sprinkles !!! Would be so cute and festive and easy. I love cake, all kinds, every kind !

I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this yet, but I like to top my kid’s homemade cake with little marzipan sculptures. I use plain marzipan, and add food coloring, then shape it into whatever I want. It’s like playing with modelling clay. I’ve done a beach theme with crabs and fish, and a space theme with planets and a rocket. Totally fun, totally doable if you have a bit of time (maybe an hour after the kids go to bed?), and you can top any basic cake. Will your hands be dyed? Yes, but it’s worth it!

In the vein of the dinosaurs on the first cake….my son wanted a dinosaur cake when he was small. I was exhausted and bereft of most creativity, so I made a simple sheet cake and put one of his dinosaurs on it. I made it look like the dinosaur was eating/ruining the cake by digging a hole, placing the dinosaur’s mouth near the hole, and sprinkling the crumbs all around. The kids were entertained and it was super easy.

In June 2020 my daughter turned 4. In trying to maker her lockdown birthday special, I asked her what she’d like her birthday cake to look like. Without skipping a beat, she replied “a unicorn eating a brain.” I got to work carving fondant unicorn… searched for the perfect brain cake recipe – Midwest Made’s Cleveland Cassata Cake! I carved the cake into ‘brain shape’ covering it in soft pink whipped cream. It has a layer of custard giving it just the right jiggle. I plopped the carved fondant unicorn against the cake, ripped out a chunk of cake and smeared it on the tiny unicorns face. It was the perfect pandemic baking project, delicious, and oh so amusing!

Googley eye cake wins for me! 🎂

One of our best-ever cakes was when my daughter was obsessed with Mythbusters. I made and frosted a two-layer chocolate cake, then she got to punch it (and then lick all the cake/frosting off her hand) then I put shards of chocolate around the crater to look like it exploded. Still one of her favorite birthday memories!

I decided I am following Joy, The Baker’s advise https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKCU-vzRjkN/ going forward after celebrating my 60th birthday this year with not a cake in sight, I will be baking my own darn cake every year. Already building a folder of options.

My husband and I celebrate our “dateversary” with boxed devil’s food cake mix and Joy the Baker’s malted peanut butter frosting (https://joythebaker.com/2021/01/everybodys-birthday-cake-chocolate-peanut-butter/). I add chocolate chips, stout beer, and an extra egg to the cake mix and top the cake with sprinkles and peanuts. I’m not a big cake person (!), but I crave this cake all year round

Angel food cake with 7 minute frosting and nonpareils sprinkles. Family favorite since my first birthday, and for all 4 of my girls. If you are interested in learning something new, or giving kids a chance to be creative: Bakeries will sell decorators frosting. Piping bags and tips are relatively inexpensive (don’t GO BIG for fun or practice). Internet videos are a valuable resource for learning flowers, leaves, fonts, decorative outlines… but little hands with little instruction can write their name and create frosting monsters (splurge on the sugar googly eyes).

As a kid I always requested my mum’s gooey chocolate cake with chocolate mousse as frosting and gummy bears on top. On my 45th birthday I found myself at my parents’ for the first birthday at home in a very long time, and my kids helped my mum make my childhood birthday cake for me. Such a highlight!

I didn’t intend for it to be a b-day cake, just wanted to try something different to bring to a dinner with friends. Our cousin often brought rolled cakes to holiday meals and I was always impressed (and a little scared to try). After watching some videos and asking said cousin for helpful tips, I made SK’s recipe: https://smittenkitchen.com/2018/05/ice-cream-cake-roll/. I used blackberry vanilla ice cream and topped with fresh raspberries and blackberries and home made whipped cream. It was a show stopper, delicious and surprisingly easy. And it turned out, one of the guests was celebrating his bday so bonus points when we popped some candles in the cake. I will definitely be putting this in the rotation!

My daughter had a Narnia themed birthday party in February. I bought some little decorative trees and some gummy snowflake candies on sale after Christmas and added them to a plain white grocery store cake. Adorable & delicious!

My best birthday cake hack for kids (although my husband has also been known to request this cake): ice cream sandwich cake. One layer of ice cream sandwiches, one layer of softened ice cream any flavor, one layer of hard shell and Oreo cookie crumbs, another layer of softened ice cream. Repeat. End with ice cream and fun toppings. If you’re feeling fancy, make it in a bowl (put a layer of plastic wrap in the bowl first for easy extraction), spreading soft ice cream all around the edges of the bowl first and then starting with the top layer of the cake and ending with a flat layer of ice cream sandwiches. Then turn it over, top with fun stuff and voilà!

If you use flowers on your cake here’s a helpful tip: MAKE SURE THEY HAVE NO BUGS IN THEM! My wedding cake had aphids crawling in the frosting that I was secretly (not so secretly) trying to pick out on my ‘perfect day’. But, in the end remember, because you will never remove them all in circumstances such as mine, aphids in frosting just taste like frosting.

For my daughters second birthday she was obsessed with sesame street and so my husband made her the most spectacular 3D Oscar the grouch cake. (It was peak covid and we had lots of time 😂) the next year she asked for a dinosaur and he spent 2 hours in the grocery store in Stockholm where we had just moved to find all the ingredients. Every year now (shes 6) she requests more and more abstract cakes and it brings me so much joy that she assumes her papa can make her ANY cake and that he always comes through

for some reason the squiggles kind of give me the icks, haha. I love the animal ones. Some of the flower ones are gorgeous, but I am still a fan of just a good old homemade cake that isn’t fancy or pretty but is extremely delicious. :) And you can NEVER go wrong with ice cream cake.

I always make this one for my kids, so easy and looks so impressive (recipe is in German, but should be easy to translate or just use any cake batter…). https://www.pink-e-pank.de/2019/09/07/schoko-schock-oder-schoko-traum-saftigster-schokokuchen-als-basis-fuer-candy-cake-geburtstagskuchen/

There is an Australian radio/podcast host + comedian, Hamish Blake (one half of Hamish & Andy fame), who takes on the most AMAZING birthday cake construction challenges for his children. And IG-blogs the whole thing. It’s very amazing. Minecraft, lego, unidonkey, Aladdin, sheep, and rubiks cubes. @hamishblakeshotz , and look at the saved story collections.

You start with a chocolate layer cake. Preferably it’s on a cake stand (which doubles as a nice fruit holder the rest of the time). To fancy it up for little boys (I have two and this cake has been requested multiple times), crushed up Oreos and tiny construction equipment never fails. To fancy it up for adults, any assortment of mixed berries piled high on top and (this part is absolutely essential IMO) dusted with powdered sugar right before serving. Does this cake need more sugar? No. But does a light dusting create a je ne sais quoi bit of magic? Definitely.

Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars are an easy way to decorate a kids cake! I afew years back I had the local grocery bakery make some grey green frosted cupcakes. I cut up green spearmint candy for ears, used Junior Mints for eyes…and ta da! Baby Yoda cupcakes!

My son’s birthday is at the end of August so I can’t be baking in my kitchen at that time. We usually buy Fat Boy Jr ice cream sandwiches that we stack onto a baking tray, wrapped, to resemble a cake. We unwrap a sandwich at the tippy top and put a candle in it for my son to blow out, then the kids just grab a sandwich for themselves. Last year, his friend Eli opted for pop tarts instead of cake for his birthday, which I thought was genius! Every kid just got a little foil thingy of their preferred flavor. As a beleaguered mom, I was like this is a home run!

I just discovered the easiest, best birthday cake for this time of year. It’s Deb Perelman’s /smitten kitchen strawberry summer stack cake from her Keepers cookbook. It’s like this one we’ve seen here https://smittenkitchen.com/2019/06/strawberry-summer-sheet-cake/ and this one https://smittenkitchen.com/2011/05/strawberry-summer-cake/ but with a sturdier base so you can stack 3 layers, with whipped cream in between. Made it last weekend for a 50th birthday party and we liked it so much the kids requested it for their birthday party this weekend. By far the easiest and most festive party cake I have ever made! (My kids decorated the top with edible flowers from the yard… kept them busy while I was stacking and frosting). Also you make it a day ahead.

Haha the tater tot cake was decisive to the COJ comment community, if I recall.

At the moment in my life baking birthday cakes = baking children’s birthday cakes. So I totally agree that having a wacky decoration is a great move. One of the more ridiculous cakes I made for one of my kids was just a regular cake that I then put a good sized toy dump truck on top of (I put sprinkles where the wheels were going to sit so that they didn’t come away covered in frosting) and filled the dumper thingy with raspberries. A HIT. I also think that more frosting, applied crazily and indiscriminately, preferably in multi-colors would guarantee unilateral thumbs up. If the top of the cake looks like it was attacked by multiple cans of silly string, that’s gonna be a win. With kids elegantly applied frosting mattereth not…the quantity doth.

Oh, this is right up my alley. We LOVE cakes and decorating them (my daughter and I). Love the cakes here. A few years ago my birthday cake was half a round watermelon with berries on top, still like looking back at the photos. My daughter has been making and decorating her own birthday cakes since primary school, she’s now 18. During Covid in the world’s most lock downed city we made my sister a limoncello sponge cake and decorated it with swirls and homemade candied lemon slices. We dropped it off at her door and hopped in the car and watched her open the door and see it sitting there. We were out of lockdown, she thought she had Covid at the time (she didn’t).

We just got back from a large family cabin trip (18 of use in total) where we celebrated my mom’s 70th bday, but since she’s not keen on attention, I made sure we had a cake for every other May bday in our group. Before the trip I called all the May birthdays and asked them what their favorite cake was. Night one was store bought chocolate cake for my niece, night two was out of the box fun fetti got my other niece and nephew and our final night we celebrated my mom’s birthday with angel food cake topped with homemade whipped cream and fresh strawberries. It was so delightful to have a cake to look forward to each night as a family. I loved it so much.

I don’t eat cake at all.. never liked it! HOWEVER..Simple Dino Cake all the way (I’m 42) lol … also the pasta cake give me the heebie jeebies. Texture? Shape? The way it looks when its cut? 🤢sorry… that one is NOT me 100%

I love baking cakes for birthdays – my take is the person being celebrated gets to choose what they want me to make for them. For my youngest niece (7), it’s lemon curd cake. For my nephew is tiramisu. For my other niece is a sponge cake with whipped cream and berries. For my parents is a ricotta strawberry cake or Italian pear cake. I use the fruit to decorate the top in fun or creative ways (like adding chocolate chips and a dop of cream to create edible googly eyes on berries). I have also used stencils to create designs as I dust tiramisu with cocoa powder. For my sister’s birthday I made a simple vanilla cake with mascarpone almond frosting, and decorated it with sunflowers and other summer flowers in a garland pattern. Super pretty and easy to assemble!

We didn’t have specially decorated cakes but my grandma would insert various items (wrapped in wax paper) in the batter. If you found a piece of straw you’d be a farmer. If you found a tiny plastic baby you’d have lots of kids. If you found a ring (dime store bought, nothing valuable) you’d get married. And if you found the quarter you’d be rich. None of us ended up in the hospital because we swallowed the predictive token. It made cutting the cake very exciting. A few years ago my cousin gave me a quarter, wrapped in wax paper in a birthday card, to remind me of this custom. We were in Canada and that quarter saved my bacon at McDonald’s — I didn’t have to break a $20 Canadian bill and end up with lots of change that I couldn’t exchange when I returned to the US!

My son turned 4 at the beginning of April, two days after I developed shingles at 9 months pregnant. I outsourced his whole birthday – Chuck E Cheese with a $10 Albertson’s (grocery store) cake. The cake looked like a silly rainbow monster and was 80% frosting, but when I tell you my son and his friend’s were OVERJOYED. They thought it was the best cake they’d ever seen. (And honestly had me rethinking all those hours slaving over his previous homemade bday cakes.) https://www.albertsons.com/orderahead/product/5-Inch-Monster-Cake-Multi-Colored?prdctId=485&catId=5

Last year (around this time) I commented that I always buy myself a birthday cake and tell the bakery what to write on it. I hope everyone who replied to me last year has gotten their own special cakes! This June is cake #5. Toot your own horn! 2024: Mom is the Best 2023: Mom is Amazing 2022: All Hail Mom 2021: You’re Fantastic, Mom And this year… 2025: Mom, Excellent As Usual

who else remembers the princess Barbie bundt cakes of the 90’s?? those were magic

When I was ten, mom made me a Peaches and Cream cake.White box cake mix, frosted with fresh whipped cream. She used canned peaches. Chopped for between the layers and then on top a lovely border of sliced peaches. I made it for my own girls. Everyone loves this simple, yummy cake.

I saw this saying on Instagram recently that made me laugh: Turns out you can just buy a birthday cake anytime and it yourself. Nobody checks.

I think cakes should have chaotic homemade decoration, like the « Chase from Paw Patrol driving a race car » cake my son had me make for his 3rd. It turned out amazing and terrible, one of my proudest moments. Think « Duck Cake » episode of Bluey. It clearly looks exactly like the toy he wanted me to copy, and equally looks like a regular degular mom who owns 0 piping bags made it.

These are so fun! I love love love birthday cakes. I’m Australian so grew up with the famous Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake book and we would spend hours looking at it and making our choice. Our mum though usually made a chocolate chair with smarties in the top and even in to our adulthood she would make that cake and it felt so special. A cake I’ve made for my daughter that I was so proud of (and took 20 million photos of) was if Rose from the Titanic and my daughter was an obsessive Titanic fan. It was so funny and something out of nailed it but everyone loved it. Another time, my youngest daughter was turning three, we had just moved into a new house so everything was hectic so I just made a simple packet cake, then let her decorate it! She dumped a whole pack of 100 and 1000s on the top, all of the smarties and some lily snakes. It was so fun and hilarious. We took it to the park and ate it under the swings. Still one of my favourite birthday memories in our family.

For summer parties, my go-to cake is an earl grey yogurt layer cake with lemon curd, blackberry jam, whipped cream, and fresh blackberries. For kids, chocolate cupcakes with chocolate chip cookie dough frosting. We just celebrated my youngest’s 5th birthday and the theme was “Pirate chaos” and that’s exactly what it was, chocolate cake and inflatable swords. It’s what I could manage.

My birthday was this past weekend and my cake, instead of candles, sported a sparkler (like this https://topsmalibu.com/collections/sparklers/products/big-golden-sparkler-bon-bon)which magically lasted exactly the length of the HappyBirthday song!

Love the two king cakes! I lived in NOLA as a kid and those are yummy!

I once made a cake themed to The Lion King for my adult daughter who had just gotten accepted to the Disney College Program. I built Pride Rock out of Rice Krispie Treats that I made, had a 13×9 cake as a base, iced it all and had little figures for all the characters. It was adorable…until we took it outside to a friend’s house in the August heat. Pride Rock collapsed, Timon and Pumba were crushed underneath, devastation in the Pride Lands! It was still a great cake!

Today is my birthday, so it was extra fun to open up CoJ and see this photo and headline! Yesterday my dear friend surprised me at a potluck with a homemade vanilla bean cake, iced rustically with buttercream and decorated with a smattering of berries and edible flowers (nasturtiums, marigolds…). It was very “me” and just perfect!

In Jenny’s Rosenstrach’s “How to Celebrate Everything” she has a double layer chocolate cake with a bunch of unwrapped dum dum lollypops pushed into the perimeter of the cake and it’s super cute, easy and festive!

My mom always did a paper doily on top of a cake, sprinkled powered sugar over it, and then carefully removed the doily. She would add fresh flower with the sugar “lace”. I think of her cakes anytime I see a paper doily!

Love the squiggles! My all-time biggest cake success was the Game of Throne Eggs I made for my daughter. I had no idea what they were about — still don’t — but she was over-the-moon. My husband build a wooden chest to hold them, and my son stuck his Bose speaker inside. The way the theme music swelled when she opened the lid…!!! Here’s a link to how I made it, if you want to see: https://jennifermurch.com/2019/07/three-shining-dragon-eggs/ The video at the bottom of the post makes me tear up and laugh all at the same time. So much joy!

Does anyone have a favorite vanilla cake recipe? I’m amazing at making cookies and pies (because I love to eat them), but don’t care for cake so therefore am not great at baking them. My partner’s bday is coming up and I want to do something homemade. He loves vanilla wedding cake :)

My son’s 4th birthday is this week and he has requested “a beautiful cake with rainbow flowers.”

My daughter’s birthday party was this past weekend and, keeping with the princess theme, I topped her cake with a few upside down ice cream cones – as turrets – that I had dipped in white chocolate and rainbow sprinkles. The turrets may have lacked some structural integrity (they all leaned forward in a Tower of Pisa moment) but my daughter’s jaw dropped to the floor when she saw it!

My kids troll me with unusual or abstract concepts as their cake requests. Jungle animals doing science experiments. Tired dinosaurs discovering volcanoes. A fairy and a pirate who want to be friends but are too shy. A losing dinosaur football team. A resigned reptile. The execution is imperfect but the intent behind each cake is absolutely there and I’ve learnt that I love the mix of science and art behind them.

My mother in law uses cut straws to hold flower stems in place and they always look lovely.

To prove that all cake is good cake, there needs to be an exception, and boy, do I have a cake that lives in infamy in my family. We were in Puerto Vallarta for my birthday, and my husband bought a cake from a nearby store. It was the worst cake I’ve ever had, and probably the only time I threw away a cake. The crazy thing is that no part of it was good, and that my husband, my 10-year-old son, and I all agreed! We started with the decorations—awful. Then the icing, yick. And then the cake, so, so bad. We couldn’t quite identify what made it so bad. In general, our cake bar is very low, and store-bought cakes are completely acceptable! It has provided a great story, and now a point of reference for everything—is it as bad as that cake in Mexico?!

Each year, my sweet grandpa would bake me a chocolate fudge birthday cake and spell out my name in M&M’s. I’ve continued the tradition with my two boys.

now i want cake for dinner.

I love cakes, but am I the only one who doesn’t want a whole garden on her cake?!?

This post is refreshing…refreshing to see cakes that are allowed to look like cakes! (Very pretty cakes! But still cakes.) Where I live (Utah) everyone is a next level cake baker and cakes are SO elaborate and time consuming. It feels like a lot of pressure every time I just want to make my kid a simple cake for his birthday.

Midsummer is approaching, and a Swedish strawberry cake will soon make its appearance. My riff on the cake is to decorate with pansies, they’re so delicate and pretty! Other summer occasions, on a similar cake, I’d add a wild tumble of berries (strawberries, rasps, blues, blackberries or maybe even lengths of red currants still on stem) lemon zest strips, and tender mint leaves.

for my son’s first birthday, i printed out photos of him and hot glued party hats and toothpicks to them. they were ridiculous but a fun way to celebrate him.

I grow a lot of edible flowers in our garden; and bake often! Impossible to go wrong with blossoms or petals + sliced fresh fruit + powdered sugar or dollops of homemade buttercream

I had to throw my high school’s 10 year reunion (which was truly the most thankless job i’ve ever done omg!!) on a tight budget but I still wanted it to be really beautiful. Everything (cheese, crackers, fruits etc) was from costco but a party-planner guest came early to make it look picnic-fancy. For the cake, I ordered a costco sheet cake completely undecorated but for white frosting (no trim, no other details) and covered the cake in sliced oranges and chamomile flowers! It was stunnnnnning. Pinteresting cakes is also such a good mood-boosting pastime.

My neighbor is a single 65 yr old woman who lives by herself and she hosted a neighborhood bday party. I made this watermelon fruit cake( made with only fruits), similar to this: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/Xi3KFdFktQ It was so easy to put together and looked so pretty and great for summer parties. Of course, kids might not like a no sugar fruit cake!

Haha, the debates and hot takes you’re re-inviting with the tot and pasta cakes! (Savory-cake-moisture firestorms, je me souviens.) I saw an aggressively beflowered cake at some point in my internet wanderings this weekend and sent an actual note to myself to rock that the next time I need to decorate a dessert; am about to send mom-friends that delightfully sugar-google-eyed cake above (which is both crittery and a sweet reminder of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE for movie nerds). That squiggle cake, in turn, is like an edible Issey Miyake piece. Love.

These are gorgeous; I especially love the raspberry cake and the multi-colored glitter squiggles! I do feel that everything on a cake should be edible (including some flowers, herbs, etc…). When I have to undress my slice it takes away some of the fun for me.

During my wedding reception, my uncle (a brilliant landscape designer) noticed our plain, white cake was undecorated. He took apart my bouquet (with my permission, I was already over hauling it around) and added the individual pieces as cake decor—all in about 5 minutes flat before the part started! He’s a plant/design genius and it made the cake look like art!

One of my kids wanted a gumball machine for his birthday, so we went all in on the theme and stuck colorful gumballs all over the white-frosted cake. Super fun and easy.

Ice cream cakes and icebox pudding cakes were always requested for birthdays. Three layers with crushed chocolate wafers btwn. My fav cake was either a strawberry shortcake or a frozen dessert that combines softened vanilla yogurt with liquified blackberry Jello, refrozen in a round cake pan. Slices nicely.

I think simple, plain Victoria sponge cake with jam in the middle and berries on top are so beautiful and taste amazing!

kid’s birthday cakes are the funnest thing ever! Mine is grown now but I did it all – Nemo fish cake, Barbie hulu dancer, chocolate everything with hershey’s minatures & lots of sprinkles … makes me realize grown ups need fun cakes too!