Flamingo Ruffle Cake Tutorial

Today's Flamingo Ruffle Cake was so much fun to make and is the perfect cake design for spring and summer gatherings, birthday parties, and more! If you love flamingo cake designs, you are in luck.

Table of Contents

Why we Love it

There are so many reasons to love this CUTE flamingo ruffle cake! here are just a few:

All buttercream cake design (but flamingo necks, legs, and even ruffles could be fondant if you prefer).
Can easily be created on sheet cakes as well
Perfect for summer birthdays, beach themed parties and more!

Materials for flamingo Ruffle cake:

For this cake, we frosted a four layer, six inch double barrel cake (which stood approximately 7 inches tall). As with our other double barrel cakes, we placed a cake cardboard halfway up with bubble tea straw supports (or your supports of choice) beneath.

We used our Fluffy Vanilla Buttercream Frosting recipe. Our Classic Vanilla Buttercream would be perfect for this also.

Gum paste & cutters for number topper (In a pinch, you can knead tylose into fondant). If you don't have a number cutter, you can also find number templates online.

Piping Tips: Tip 5 (head and neck), Tip 3 (legs), Tip 2 (eyes), Tip 3 bead borders, 104 petal tip for ruffles

Coloring Gels: We tinted our buttercream with Americolor Deep Pink, Sky Blue

Piping Gel or Tylose Glue

Candy coating for attaching anchors to back of number topper

Disposable Piping Bags

Small paintbrushes for applying piping gel "glue"

Cake cardboards - For the bottom and middle of the double barrel cake

Bubble Tea Straw Supports (or supports of choice)- We used 4 supports beneath the middle cake board halfway up.

Miscellaneous: We used disposable piping bags, small offset spatula, turntable for frosting the cake, bench scraper is helpful. Cake base/drum/ or pedestal (this is a heavy cake, if using cake cardboards for your base, stack about 4 together and wrap with cake foil, plastic tablecloth, etc.

FAQs

This flamingo design could easily be recreated on a fondant cake with fondant flamingoes (I would knead a little tylose powder into the fondant before making ruffles if you go this route.)

We have a video on ruffled fondant that you can find here: Fondant Ruffle Cake Tutorial-you would just make your fondant strips much smaller for this project.

You could also cover the cake in fondant and still make ruffles using a crusting vanilla buttercream. I've never had an issue with piping crusting buttercream accents onto fondant.

If you are attaching the flamingoes to a fondant covered cake, you can use tylose glue, piping gel, or your edible glue of choice.

We like to work with crusting buttercream frostings like our Classic Vanilla Buttercream or Fluffy Vanilla Buttercream. These are crusting frostings that are easy to make, taste great, and pipe perfectly!

If your ruffles don't hold their shape when piping them with a 104 piping tip, your frosting is either too warm, or just needs a bit more powdered sugar. (You can pop the piping bag or bowl of frosting in the refrigerator for a few minutes if needed!)

No you don't! If you don't want to pipe the flamingoes necks and heads, you can form these with fondant (using an extruder or just rolling by hand.) We did something similar another fun Flamingo Cake tutorial! You could do this for the legs also!

Depending on the height of your cake (and flamingoes), you may decide to go with more ruffles or fewer. You could even do rows of buttercream rosettes or stars piped from a star tip.

If you need more details on working with Ruffle Piping Tips, we have a tutorial for this! Piping Basics: Petal and Ruffle Tips.

More Flamingo Cake Ideas

If you love flamingo cakes, this is a great post for you! We just love all of the flamingo cake designs that pop up this time of year!

Here are a few flamingo cake designs and cake toppers for you to check out!

Valentine Flamingos Cake- Free Video Tutorial

Flamingo Cake (with ombre buttercream)- Free Video

Flamingo Cake Toppers- Bride and Groom- Free Video

Lily Pulitzer Inspired Cupcakes - Cake Blog Tutorial

Enjoy the Video!

Thanks so much for stopping by today! We hope that you will give this sweet ruffled flamingo cake a try. It would be perfect for birthdays and summer parties!

Make sure to check out our other summer cake ideas also, as well as summer cake recipes!

Some of our favorite recipes are: Almond Cake, Lemon Cake, Strawberry Cake, and White Velvet Cake! Here are a few more: