Decorated birthday cakes can really be expensive, but it’s easy to do it yourself. Here are some easy ideas for decorating birthday cakes for a lot less!

Decorating Birthday Cakes

Our family has 6 birthdays within a couple of weeks time so, at that time of the year we are often frantically trying to figure out how to decorate birthday cakes for everyone. Decorated cakes can really be expensive and we have a hard time spending a fortune on a cake that’s not going to last very long.

Here are a couple ideas to get you started if you to want to save money or just prefer to decorate your own cakes. You don’t have to take professional classes to to learn to decorate your own cakes and make them really cute.

Try these cake decorating ideas you can do with a simple basic frosted cake.

• Use party favors. Go to the party section of your dollar store and buy a bag of party favors to decorate your cake. For example, my one grandson loves balls of every sort so we would buy a package of assorted balls. You could also use some of your children’s own small favorite toys, like miniature Barbies, legos, dinosaurs etc. (We shouldn’t need to say this, BUT– Be sure that you don’t serve the toys to kids who might not know not to eat them. ;-)

  Just stack or arrange them in a nice order on the cake, write happy birthday in frosting, add candles and you’re done.

• Remember it doesn’t have to be fancy. Kids love lots of colors, so you could frost a cake in white frosting or whipped cream and then sprinkle a bunch of colorful sprinkles on it.
• Place a huge mound of the child’s favorite candy on the cake – wrapped or unwrapped it doesn’t matter.
• Do you struggle because your hand shakes when writing letters? I did not have a steady hand to write letters on a cake, but I discovered this trick that helped me. Use a tooth pick to write your letters first. If they don’t look right, you can smooth the frosting and start over.
• Use cookie cutters to gently press letters, numbers or a design on top of a cake and use that as your pattern to follow or fill in.
• When all else fails, buy a cake. If you can’t use any of the above suggestions and really feel you must buy a cake, then watch when you favorite grocery store puts their cakes on clearance and buy one on clearance. You can easily freeze cakes so give yourself plenty of  time to look and then freeze one if you need too.
• Who says you need a cake? Some kids would love to see a stack of ice cream sandwiches, cupcakes or special cookies with candles in them more than a cake, so think out of the box. If you are desperate, stack something like their favorite Little Debbie cakes and add candles.

Relax– If it has lots of color and candles and has their name on it, most kids don’t care if it is a little lopsided or strange looking. It’s their birthday and they are looking at the world through rose colored glasses, so just do the best you can. You won’t warp them forever if you give them a cake with crooked lettering. :)

Jill