Store-bought birthday cakes or birthday cakes you make using fancy cake pans can be fun, but creative birthday cake ideas for children can be even more fun. All you need are basic types of baking pans you're likely to already have, plus your imagination and creativity. You can express your artistic side while making a unique cake to delight your birthday child.
A rectangular layer cake and six chocolate donuts can be transformed into a commercial truck with lots of space for candles and a birthday message. You can even pipe a frosting number that represents the child's age on the door of the truck. All you have to do for creative birthday cake ideas for children who love trucks is to use a large square section of the cake for the back of the truck, a smaller square for the front cab area of the truck and chocolate donuts in pairs to make the wheels.
Two round cakes can be decorated to look like the number eight to celebrate an eighth birthday. Icing can be used around the edges and in the center to form a circle in the middle so that the rounds look more like the number eight than just plain circles. Four candles can be placed in the center of each middle circle. You can add colorful candies in the “rings” of the circles to add more interest and accentuate the number eight shape.
A round cake can also be decorated like a clock and these make creative birthday cake ideas for children up to age twelve. You can use two lollipops for clock hands by trimming the stem of one of the lollipops. It's easy to "glue" the lollipops in the center of the frosted cake with a dab of icing. You simply show the clock hands pointing to the icing numbers you've piped around the edge of the clock cake. For example, a child turning five would have a cake that shows a time of five o'clock.
Really simple, yet creative birthday cake ideas for children involve using a round cake for an animal face, cupcake or other edible items for ears and candies and/or piped frosting for facial features. You can also make more detailed creative birthday cake ideas for children by using a loaf cake pan to make a train-shaped cake that you add detail to with frosting. You may want to use round chocolate wafers for wheels, but many other ideas would also work. The train cake could be placed on a rectangular frosted sheet cake that you decorate with chocolate cookie crumbs and licorice to look like ground with railroad tracks.
You can also make children's birthday cakes to resemble scenes from popular children's stories and poems. For example, a loaf cake with a large chocolate Easter egg on it can be transformed into Humpty Dumpty sitting on a brick wall. If you'd rather just stick to simpler creative birthday cake ideas for children, a really easy idea is to use cupcakes to spell out the child's name and a "Happy Birthday" message. You can pipe one letter on each cupcake with frosting and also just decorate some cupcakes with candies rather than an icing letter.