Cake Ideas: Easy to Make Ice Age Glacier Birthday Cake

"Ice Age" and "Ice Age 2, The Melt Down" are still popular toys and boy's birthday party themes, and with the recent releasing of "Ice Age 2, The Melt Down" on DVD, there is sure to be a resurgence in Ice Age birthday parties. Of course, Woolly Mammoths, cavemen, and prehistoric Ice-Age beasts are never out of style with young boys, so this is one cake idea to tuck in your recipe box and save your next Neanderthal's birthday celebration.

Birthday cakes bought in grocery stores and bakeries are far overpriced of their ingredients. You can save fifteen to twenty dollars (or more!) easily by making and decorating your own Ice Age birthday cake at home. This Ice Age birthday cake is simply made from two nine by thirteen inch cakes and requires virtually no cake decorating experience.

Supplies
To make your Ice Age glacier birthday cake, you will need:
-2 Box cake mixes and additional ingredients to prepare (home scratch cake recipes are acceptable, too)
-3 cans frosting, or 6 cups frosting prepared from scratch
-Blue food coloring
-Plastic Ice Age figures or plastic Woolly Mammoths, saber tooth tigers, or other prehistoric, Ice Age creatures
-Flat, covered board or purchased cake board

Baking the Cake
Choose any type of cake mix in any flavor you like and bake according to the package directions. For this cake, you will need two nine by thirteen inch birthday cakes (two box mixes). They can be the same flavor or different to suit an array of taste preferences. Any favorite home made scratch cake recipe will work equally well.

Cake Assembly
After baking, cool birthday cakes completely on wire racks.

Place one whole, intact nine by thirteen birthday cake in the center of the prepared cake board.

Cut the remaining birthday cake into large chunks of various shapes and sizes. Leave one chunk large, only slightly smaller than half the birthday cake's size.

To form the glacier for your Ice Age birthday cake, position the remaining large birthday cake chunk on the top of the first birthday cake layer, aligning the back corner and edges.

Arrange remaining birthday cake pieces randomly around the outside and bottom of the cake. Continue to play with the birthday cake design a little until you have achieved the jagged, stepped look of a crumbling glacier with varying levels.

Color the majority of the frosting light blue. For this, Wilton's paste food coloring produces the best, most vibrant birthday cake frosting colors. Save some aside if you want to create details such as the mud puddles and darker pools of water seen here in the picture of the Ice Age Glacier birthday cake.

Frost the entire Ice Age Glacier birthday cake with the light, icy blue frosting. Use darker colors to create melting pools of water and streams or mud puddles near which figures can be set. Write the birthday boy's vital information into the water streams, or on the cake board directly along the edge of the Ice Age birthday cake.

Arrange your Ice Age movie figures or plastic prehistoric animals in various positions around the Ice Age birthday cake.

Celebrate
Your Ice Age Birthday cake is finished, and the rest of the party is up to you. Enjoy some prehistoric punch, excavate ice-trapped mammals, play some mammoth trivia, or a game of pin the tooth on the saber toothed tiger.

Above all else, ENJOY!

Need more birthday ideas and chilren's activities? See more articles by Mary Ward on Associated Content.