Beach Themed Birthday Cake

This Beach Themed cake is perfect for a summer birthday party for adults or kids. It makes a great centerpiece or a buffet as well. Making the Beach Themed Cake should take you about 30 minutes to 1 hour after your cake has baked and cooled. Include the kids in on this fun and edible craft project. They will have a great time adding the realistic touches to the Beach Themed Cake. They'll even have fun gobbling up this great summer cake!

Here are the ingredients you need to make a Beach Themed cake:

Box Brownie or Chocolate Cake mix

Crushed Graham Crackers (3 Cups)

Whole Graham Crackers

Chocolate Icing

White Icing

Blue Jell-O

Cookie cutters

Tube of Black Writing Icing

Black Food Coloring

Paring Knife

Green Icing

Piping bag/ Zip Loc Bags

Cool Whip

Paring knife

The first thing you need to do is make your blue Jell-O following your package instruction. Instead of pouring this into bowls, pour it into a large cake pan, so that you end up with a sheet of blue Jell-O about one inch thick.

Let this cool and gel up, like normal.

To start making your Beach Themed cake you need to do a little preparation. After preparation is over I will give assembling instructions.

First, bake you brownie or cake in a 9" X 13" pan. Let it cool. Flip it over onto a serving platter. If you don't have a cute serving platter suitable for the beach theme you can flip you cake over on a cutting board wrapped with aluminum foil. I like to make sure that the serving platter is a few inches larger than the brownie or cake so that the edible crafts can spill over past the edges of the Beach Themed cake.

To make the beach umbrellas lay a graham cracker on a microwave able plate. Microwave for about 20 second (this can vary depending on the microwave). Use your paring knife to cut out the beach umbrella shape. The microwave simply softens the graham cracker, making it easy to cut. Let your beach umbrella harden and cool off.

Now, use your food coloring to color some white icing. Use clean new paintbrushes to paint on the colored icing to add color to the beach umbrella.

You can make whole beach towels using whole graham crackers and the colored icings as well.

Lay these out to dry on a piece of wax paper.

Once your Beach Themed cake has cool slather the entire thing with white icing icing. Don't worry about making it perfectly flat, because the lumpier the better.

Now, use a paring knife to cut out your blue Jell-O like water. I recommend cutting out one end to match up with your cake. Just with three straight sides. On the final side make scallop edges, like waves.

Now, place this on one end of your cake on top of the icing with the straight edges matching up with the cake. Let the scalloped edges be in the middle.

Now, place the beach umbrellas around on your cake on the opposite side of the Jell-O. Use your ground up or crushed graham cracker cookies to sprinkle all over like sand. Have the sand butt up to the watery Jell-O.

Now you can start adding a lot of Halloween details to your Beach Themed cake. Green icing can be piped on with a piping bag or a zip loc bag to look like wilting beach grass. You could also microwave some more graham crackers and cit out a picket fence to frame out the Beach. The more your fence cracks and falls apart the better, like weathered driftwood.

You can also add white foam to your Jell-O water/ waves. First, you could fill a Ziploc bag with cool whip and pipe thin scallops out onto your cake. You want these to mimic the scallops you cut out on the end of the blue water colored Jell-O.

The sky is the limit with all of the details you can add to this Beach Themed cake. Look for candy in realistic shapes like gummy bare fishes to add realistic touches! I made this Beach Themed cake for a birthday one year and it worked great!