Donut Cake Birthday Cake

My son’s golden birthday was a couple weeks ago. Literally the week before his family birthday party, he sprung on us that he did not like cake. Which I still find a little suspicious since he we’ve all seen him eat cake, but whatever! One thing he does love is donuts. I think he could eat his body weight in Krispy Kreme donuts! Since we are such awesome parents, we set out to make him one epic, golden birthday donut cake made from Krispy Kreme donuts! And epic it was!

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I wish I would have gotten a better picture of the cake, but it was such a busy day. Regardless, it’s not really the outside of the cake that matters!

Donut Cake Birthday Cake

Krispy Kreme donuts are one of my son’s favorite kind of donuts. Since we have a Krispy Kreme factory near us, we knew we wanted to pick up a few dozen from the factory for the donut cake. Piece of advice, call ahead to make sure you can get the donuts before they go in the glazer. We figured the glaze and the frosting would be too much together. The factory had no problem pulling three dozen for us.

First things first, pick up this rotating cake turntable and frosting supplies. Trust me. It will come in handy. Next key thing is to put a little frosting on the bottom of the cake board so your first layer of donuts do not slide around. When we figured out how many donuts each layer needed, it became rather easy. You will want to cut pieces of donuts to fill in the gaps on the sides and in the centers of each of the donuts. Otherwise you will have to fill it with frosting and that’s a lot of frosting!

What Kind of Frosting?

Since this was a spur of the moment cake, we opted to buy the Wilton frosting in the big tubs at Michaels (use a 40% off coupon). We purchased the medium consistency and while it worked out ok, it was hard to smooth. If we ever make a cake again, we will probably thicken the frosting a bit with powdered sugar. I’ve never tried that, but read it online on a few different sites. However, at 1 am, we just wanted to be done! While we opted for store bought icing, you can totally make your favorite icing recipe.

Decorating the Cake

Our birthday party theme was “Golden Birthday” so we wanted to make the cake completely gold. Do you know how hard it is to find gold cake decorating supplies in June?!? Apparently gold is a popular theme with graduation parties too! Nevertheless, we found what we needed. The things we liked are pictured below. Be sure to continue reading to find out the one thing you DON’T want to buy. It’s nasty!

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The Wilton Color Mist comes in a wide variety of colors and goes on really nice. Kind of like spray paint. The nice thing is, it does taste funny or anything. I was worried about it tasting like food coloring. Thankfully it didn’t. We also used the edible glitter. That looked really cool on the cake, but when my son blew out the candles, he blew edible glitter all over the table. The spray glitter was on my list to get, but none of the stores near me had it in gold. I was very bummed about that.

You may have seen the cake decorating videos online where they decorate the cake by pouring that mirror glaze looking stuff all over the cake. Hobby Lobby sells it. We thought it looked cool and picked one up. Thankfully we did not use it. It was absolutely disgusting. I can’t even describe how awful it tasted. Not only that, but the reviews online are not that great either. This is what we bought.

So…How did the Cake Turn Out?

The million dollar question here is, how did the donut cake turn out? Are you wondering if the cake imploded when we cut into it? We wondered that! But guess what, it didn’t! It was a huge hit at the party. I think almost everyone had a piece of the donut cake! While the picture below is not the prettiest, the cake itself turned out really well. There was a bit too much frosting, but we really weren’t sure how much we would need to “glue” the donuts together! Next time (if there will be another donut cake), we will use less frosting!

Like I said, it may not look pretty, but everyone loved the cake! It was different than your regular birthday cake!

A Few Tips

After making the cake once, we have a few tips that, if we make another one, we will definitely be changing a few things.

• First, use less frosting. After making it, we realized you really only need enough frosting to “glue” the layers of the cake together.
• Second, do a thin layer on top and all around and then use fondant or maybe a much stiffer frosting to smooth the cake. We’ve used a marshmallow fondant in the past and it worked out well.
• Third, use the Krispy Kreme donuts that don’t have the hole cut in the center. They cost a bit more, but they would also work well.

All in all, this was a fun activity and a nice edition to our son’s Golden Birthday. Next year he will be 16 and I already have plans as to what that cake will be!!