This Hawaiian Luau Waterfall Birthday Cake was for a relative’s birthday party. It is four tiers (some chocolate and some vanilla cake) with an extra side cake (actually the cut off top of the 6″ cake) for the tiki. The round tier sizes are 14″, 12″, 9″, and 6″. I leveled the top of each tier and I offset each tier to make it interesting. It is all edible except the tiki statue and the hula girl.
The waterfall is white buttercream icing with sky blue colored piping gel on top. The water at bottom is blue buttercream. The sand is made of graham cracker crumbs on top of tan buttercream. The palm trees are pretzel sticks with gum paste leaves (I found instructions on the Wilton website).
The leaves are stuck to the pretzels with royal icing and I really needed an extra day or two for these to harden. Some palm leaves fell off during the party, but fortunately most of the leaves stayed put. I also placed gum paste palm leaves on top of the green buttercream icing on the top two tiers. The coconuts are chocolate covered macadamia nuts. Orange flowers are royal icing.
Bamboo stalks are hazelnut chocolate filled cookies. These looked great but most of the cookies ended up absorbing the moisture from the icing and became chewy instead of crunchy (they still tasted good). Rocks are marshmallow jelly beans. Swedish fish (gummy fish) are in the water. I used cake boards in between each tier and wooden dowel rods to support the cake. It was a lot of work, but it was fun to make.
I later added Wilton color flame birthday candles along the waterfall. The different color flames were so pretty! This is just my second decorated cake and thanks to ideas from this website it was a success!
Wow! This cake is awesome! Very creative!
Do you suppose that the rods in between layers were necessary? Could I skip them?
i love the look of this cake. my mother in law is going to be 65 in Feb. She has turned her carport into what she calls the Cabana. this is going to make a wonderful center piece for the table for her surprise party I am planing for her.last year I made a Betty boop cake for her that i put on here. I cant wait to see here face when she see this cake.
Thank you so much for the idea