Building a Beach

So since my kiddos Brock and Emma have birthdays so close together (about 3 weeks), we decided to to their parties combined.  They chose a beach party theme (pictures and a post from that to come later.)  Anyway,  we decided to do the cake at home and decorate it ourselves.  Since I am not a cake decorator I was a little nervous as to how it would turn out.
First I made one of my kids and husbands favorite cakes, a Texas fudge cake, and put it in a large sheet pan.  Then i let it cool and here is where it got really fun!

First I tinted some icing blue and iced one side of the cake and made it really thick to be waves of the water

Then I iced the other side white and crushed up some graham crackers to make the sand

Here is what it looked like with that all done

Here are my little helpers. Although you can see from their faces they were doing more eating than helping

Then we had to add our people and other decorations to the beach.  We used some icing to give our teddy graham beach goers swim trunks and bikinis.

Then we added the writing on the cake.  We also made beach towels, a surf board and a shark fin out of graham crackers and then added our people and the candles.  This is the finished product.

All in all it turned out to be a really fun project.  And the kids loved it.  In the words of Emma "mom that is the most awesomest cake ever!"