Easy Beatles Birthday Cake

This adorable Beatles birthday cake is easy enough for any beginner baker to decorate.

My sweet Peanut turned THIRTEEN during this crazy 2020 quarantine. I started this blog when she wasn't even two years old and y'all have watched her grow up right along with me.

Even though she's getting older, she still loves having a birthday party theme for her cake every year. It's always so fun to hear what she has in mind every spring.

Just when I thought we couldn't beat last year's adorable cake, she handed me the assignment of giving her a Beatles themed party this year for her special milestone.

If you've seen my birthday cakes from previous years, you know I don't decorate with frosting very well. I'm always looking for clever workarounds that are easy enough anyone of you could also do.

For her Beatles cake, I decided to do a mash-up of Yellow Submarine and Octopus Garden, two of our favorite Beatles songs.

She simply LOVED it:

How to bake an easy Beatles birthday cake:

Making an adorable Beatles themed birthday cake is so much easier than you think. It is perfect for any teen birthday party or for your favorite adult music-lover. Here's everything you need to recreate our cake perfectly.

Step 1: Bake the layer cake

For the Peanut's cake the last couple of years, we've used the recipe for the almond-chocolate chip cake I featured in The Ultimate Kids' Baking Book.

In the book, it is shown as a 9x13 sheet cake, but I divide the batter into two round cake pans to make a layer cake.

You can bake any cake recipe your birthday girl or boy loves most. Even a boxed cake mix will do.

If you need help figuring out how to bake perfectly even cake layers, be sure to check out my birthday cake baking guide for beginners here.

Step 2: Frost the layer cake

I made a homemade batch of vanilla buttercream frosting. You can also find that recipe in The Ultimate Kids' Baking Book.

I took about 1 cup of frosting out and placed it into a small bowl to tint green for the seaweed and then tinted the remaining batch of frosting a tropical ocean blue with my favorite gel tints. Read more about them here.

I used a butter knife to assemble and frost the layer cake. I purposely frosted it in my easy-peasy messy method so that the frosting would look a little bit like water waves.

You can see the step-by-step video of how I frost a cake here.

Step 3: Decorate the Beatles cake

This part is the most fun and so easy! I placed the green frosting into a piping bag with Wilton tip #44 and just freehanded the seaweed up the side of the cake. I squeezed and slightly wiggled my lines up the cake to give them an imperfect line to mimic waving seaweed. You can get the same tip in this frosting tip set.

Then we dotted these adorable colorful candy flowers all over the seaweed to mimic a garden feel.

I finished the cake off with the Beatle's Yellow Submarine toy made by Hot Wheels. You can get one right here.

The Hot Wheels toy has open wheels on the bottom we didn't want to get filled with frosting. To protect the toy, I cut a tiny piece of waxed paper to lay down just underneath it on the frosting. You can't even see it, but then we were able to give it a quick wipe after the party and it is an adorable little memento from her birthday for her shelf.

If the Hot Wheels toy is no longer available, you could use any yellow submarine bath toy!