This easy homemade tropical flamingo birthday cake is perfect for your pink flamingo party. Invite your friends to "flamingle" with these sunny party decorations, too.
Planning a light and fun tropical flamingo birthday and need a festive and easy cake to go with the theme?
You are going to love how simple this tropical flamingo birthday cake is to recreate for yourself.
We made this delicious cake for my daughter's 10th birthday which included taking her and some friends to a painting studio to paint their own pink flamingos!
We went with the crafty theme for the rest of the party and everyone loved it so much.
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How to Make a Flamingo Cake
I'm all about using easy cake decorating hacks to make adorable homemade birthday cakes for my kids.
It is one of our favorite family traditions and I always keep it easy.
For this tropical flamingo cake, I decided to keep it extra easy by using pink flamingo birthday candles.
We made a simple layer cake with blue frosting to represent the ocean and I piped a little bit of green frosting around the edge to mimic a tropical island.
You could also decorate the cake entirely in green frosting and make a flamingo yard ornament cake!
Tropical Flamingo Birthday Cake Supplies
To recreate our flamingo cake, you need a few handy supplies:
- A Birthday Cake: You can make your own from scratch, use a boxed cake mix, or even buy a plain birthday cake from the grocery store and dress it up.
- Frosting: If you want to customize the frosting color, you need a batch of homemade frosting you can tint. Our all-time favorite is this easy cream cheese frosting.
- Pink Flamingo Candles: See my notes below.
- Grass Frosting Tip: The piping tip I used to make the green grass is in this piping set.
- Frosting Tools: If you don't already have them, be sure to pick up disposable pastry bags and decorator tip connectors
Pink Flamingo Birthday Candles
Unfortunately, the candles we used for our cake are no longer available.
However, I did some digging for alternatives for you and found these fun and festive options that would totally work:
- Pink Flamingo Cake Topper: This is an adorable option here.
- Tall Glittery Pink Birthday Candles: The long size of these gorgeous birthday candles gives you more time to sing happy birthday!
- Pink Flamingo Candles: If you had your heart set on actual flamingo candles, this set is currently available.
- Pink Flamingo Figurines: This set of 28 pink flamingos would be adorable scattered over a layer cake, sheetcake, or cupcakes.
Bake the Cake
My birthday girl requested a chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. This has always been one of her favorite combos!
I used a chocolate cake mix for the layer cake to keep it simple.
Even when I'm baking a box mix, I always prep my cake pans with cake strips so I get perfectly even layers.
How to Decorate the Cake
To decorate the flamingo cake, I tinted ¾ of the frosting aqua blue and then tinted the remaining frosting for green grass and added the phenomenal pink flamingo lawn ornament candles.
Take a cup or so of the frosting batch and reserve it in a small bowl. Don't tint it green for the grass until you've finished icing the rest of the cake blue.
Spread the blue frosting all over the top of the cake. You can spread it smooth or leave it slightly "wavy" if you're trying to mimic water waves.
Once the cake is completely frosted, tint the reserved frosting grass green.
Add the green frosting to a piping bag with this grass piping tip and pipe the grass along the border of the cake.
Tropical Flamingo Cupcakes Variation
The flamingo layer cake was our family birthday cake for our home party.
However, for the birthday party with her friends at the painting studio, I wanted flamingo cupcakes that were more portable to bring along.
Using the same general design idea, we recreated the cake in cupcake form.
The flamingo cupcakes were made from a simple funfetti box mix and frosted with aqua blue cream cheese frosting.
My daughter crushed up graham crackers to mimic sand and we sprinkled it on one side of the cupcake top.
We added a pink flamingo cake topper and a tiny plastic palm tree to complete the scene.
Supplies You Need for Cupcakes
- Baked Cupcakes
- Aqua Blue Tinted Frosting
- Graham Cracker Crumbs
- Food Color Gels: If you don't already have food gels, this is my favorite set.
- Pink Polka Dot Cupcake Wrappers: These cupcake wrappers match the party perfectly.
- Flamingo Cupcake Picks: The ones we used are still available here.
- Palm Trees: The ones we used are still available here.
Tropical Flamingo Party Ideas
My daughter's favorite part of her tropical flamingo party was painting these adorable pink flamingos at a local art studio.
It was so cute seeing all the girls' flamingos lined up at the end!
Pink Flamingo Party Decorations
To give your flamingo party extra flair, add a few simple party decorations!
I picked up some hot pink gerbera daisies, orange tulips, and white stock: my favorite Trader Joe's flowers!
I added an adorable sunshine mylar balloon and some tropical colored latex balloons to decorate the room.
This batch of pink flamingo party plates and napkins has everything you need to finish off the supply list.
See the flamingo paintings in the far back?
Each of us painted one at her party, so we used them as decor in the dining room.
We keep joking that we need to turn one of the rooms in our house into a flamingo/tropical room so we can display our flamingo family.
I enjoy doing birthday themes each year with the girls, but this one might be my new favorite. All that pink flamingo fun was just too precious.
If you wanted to incorporate more of the ocean fun to the party, you could totally make this adorable and easy mermaid sheet cake, too.
📖 Recipe
Tropical Flamingo Birthday Cake
Ingredients
- 1 boxed cake mix in your favorite flavor prepared according to box directions
- 1 batch of homemade frosting or 2 cans of prepared frosting
- Pink flamingo cake decorating tools See Notes
Instructions
- Prepare the box cake mix according to the package instructions. You can make this flamingo cake as a round layer cake or as a rectangular 9x13-inch sheet cake, whichever you prefer.
- Let the cake completely cool before you attempt to frost it.
- Tint ¾ of your frosting aqua blue for the water, reserve the last ¼ of the frosting until you are finished in case you need a little more.
- Ice the entire surface of the cake with the blue frosting. Once done, tint the reserved frosting a grass green color.
- Use the special grass tip to pipe green grass around the border of the cake. (See product listing below.)
- Add pink birthday candles and flamingo cake toppers to finish the cake.
Recipe Notes
Flamingo Cupcake Variation:
If you prefer to make flamingo cupcakes, you can use the flamingo cupcake picks and mini palm trees mentioned in the post above. Adding crushed graham crackers to form the sand is a special detail to consider adding, too.Save This Recipe to Your Recipe Box
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