Here, you’ll find 25 unique sheet cake ideas to celebrate a birthday, a retirement, or any occasion and impress all your guests. If you’re looking for inspiration to place an order with your local baker, or you want to recreate one of these cakes yourself thanks to the guidance I provide, you’re in the perfect place.
How to find a sheet cake idea suited to your cake-decorating level?
I’ve come up with a system. The cake ideas are presented to you according to their level of difficulty. There are three categories :
What Are Beginner Cake Ideas?
These are easy cake ideas. If you’ve never decorated a cake before (or only did it once or twice), these are the cakes that you should pay attention to.
- What you’ll find: Beautiful cake ideas that only require basic cake decorating techniques. This is a great place to start your journey.
What Are Intermediate Cake Ideas?
Low Intermediate Baker: If you are confident that you’ve mastered the cake decorating basics, such as how to smooth a cake, but feel like you still have a lot of techniques to learn apart from this foundation, this category is perfect for you.
- What you’ll find: Cake ideas that require both basic decorating skills and one or two techniques that are a little bit more advanced. This is a great place to grow your cake-decorating skills.
High Intermediate Baker: If you’ve mastered both basic techniques and several more advanced cake decorating techniques, these cake ideas are made for you.
- What you’ll find: Stunning cake ideas that can be fairly challenging, but are a great place to get even better than you already are.
What Are Advanced Cake Ideas?
If you consider yourself an experienced cake decorator and have mastered most of the decorating techniques, including the use of fondant, then this is the perfect place for you.
- What you’ll find: Showstopping and challenging cake ideas, perfect to sharpen and maintain your skills.
The Grading System
Finally, I’ve also assigned a grade of difficulty to each cake inspiration: 1/5 being the easiest design and 5/5 being the hardest. The goal is to make the ranking the most accurate possible. You will find this to be particularly helpful if you happen to fall in the Beginner or the Intermediate Cake Ideas categories.
Growth Tip : This list is great a place to set goals about your cake decorating skills. Pin this post and come back later to tell us how far you’ve come in your cake decorating journey !
How to follow the instructions of the designs.
For the cake designs in the beginner category: I’ll provide written instructions on how to recreate the cake idea presented to you. Don’t hesitate to watch video tutorials about basic techniques such as how to smooth a cake.
For the designs in the intermediate category: I’ll provide some guidance on how to perform the more complicated techniques.
For the advanced category: you are an experienced baker, at this point, and you will find great opportunities to put this experience to use. To be completely honest, I cannot make myself several cake ideas from the advanced category, so trust your abilities and go for it.
Find the perfect sheet cake idea for your baking skills.
Growth Tip : If you aim to get better at cake decorating, you should choose a cake idea that feels sligthly above your current cake decorating level. Get out of your comfort zone !
Sheet Cake Ideas For Beginner Bakers
Here, you’ll only find 1 easy sheet cake decorating idea, as I believe round cakes are the most beginner bakers friendly cake.
Easy Sheet Cake
Difficulty Level: 1,75/5.
What you will need:
- Enough frosting to cover your cake.
- Nontoxic fresh flowers with their stems wrapped in floral tape.
- Dried edible flowers.
How to recreate this cake?
- First, crumb coat, cover, chill, and cut the edges of your cake as explained in this sheet cake tutorial.
- Then, once your buttercream is set, add your flowers and dried flowers on your frosted cake.
What you’ve learned :
The first technique you have to master as a beginner cake decorator is how to frost a cake, in this case a sheet cake, properly.
Sheet Cake Ideas Perfect For Intermediate Bakers
Here, you’ll find 18 sheet cake ideas perfect for intermediate bakers.
Elegant Sheet Cake
Difficulty Level: 2,5/5 (Low-Intermediate)
A little guidance
Once your cake is frosted and chilled, you can add touches of buttercream here and there with an angled spatula, as shown in this painted cake tutorial. Use edible gold leaves and DIY golden paint to add golden accents.
Floral Sheet Cake
Difficulty Level: 2,5/5 (Low-Intermediate)
A little guidance
To recreate this kind of whimsical and floral cake you’ll need a basketweave piping tip (such as the #789 by Wilton) and a ruffle piping tip (like the #102 by WIlton). Check out this tutorial to recreate this beautiful ombré pink and green buttercream.
Football Sheet Cake
Difficulty Level: 2,5/5 (Low-Intermediate)
Using small toys for a themed sheet cake design is a great beginner-friendly alternative to fondant and paper cake toppers.
A little guidance
To create this kind of popular cake design, take a look at this basic piping tutorial that’ll teach you all the basic piping techniques.
Textured Sheet Cakes
Difficulty Level: 3/5 (Intermediate)
You could also add texture to your sheet cake to make it even more unique.
A little guidance
To do so you’ll need the help of a cake comb. Depending on what shape you’re buying you’ll end up with different results. Simply use them as you would your usual cake scrapper.
Decorated Sheet Cakes
Difficulty Level: 3/5 (Intermediate)
Sheet cakes are the perfect message cake.
A little guidance
The easiest way to write your cake is to use fondant. You can either use silicon molds or use stamps/embossers depending on the final result you’re looking for.
Fortnite Sheet Cake
Difficulty Level: 3/5 (Intermediate)
A little guidance
If you want to recreate this kind of cake with a lot different colors and shades, you’ll either need a few sets of piping tip couplers or a DIY alternative.
Vintage Sheet Cakes
Difficulty Level: 3,5/5 (High-Intermediate)
If you like the vintage cake trend, you can recreate it even on a sheet cake.
A little guidance
To do so you can follow this vintage buttercream piping tutorial.
Fondant Sheet Cakes
Difficulty Level: 4/5 (High-Intermediate)
Rather than using store-bought cake toppers, you can also create your own edible cake decorations using fondant but you’ll need to put in quite some work.
A little guidance
To give you a head start you can follow this fondant sea animals tutorial.
Sheet Cake Ideas For Advanced Bakers
These 6 sheet cake ideas will be perfectly suited to experienced cake decorators.
Black And White Sheet Cake
Difficulty Level: 5/5
You can easily opt for a more classical cake design, by shifting the colors and using simple pipings.
Wedding Sheet Cake
Difficulty Level: 5/5
You can even use a sheet cake as a wedding cake idea.
Buttercream Flowers Sheet Cakes
Difficulty level: 5/5
Moreover, sheet cakes make beautiful floral cake for spring and summer birthdays.
Unique Sheet Cake
Difficulty Level: 5/5
Finally, sheet cakes are the perfect type of cake to express your creativity as they’re is much more space to do so than on a round cake.
If you’re looking for more cake ideas, check out my other cake ideas for women or my cake ideas for girls.
Did you enjoy these sheet cake inspirations? Sharing is caring! Pin this post to come back to it.
Please let me know in the comments if you’d like some specific cake ideas and/or tag me on Instagram @theperfectcakeidea. I’d also love to see your creations.
