Thoughtful Ideas for 50th Birthday Cakes
These thoughtful ideas for a 50th birthday cake will make a milestone year all the more special. Turning 50 is an important moment in anyone’s life. You’ve lived and learned, but you still have time to put what you know into practice and to pursue what you love.
Celebrate this time with respect, originality and a sense of fun. Just mocking someone as “old” or “over the hill” is not only insensitive, it’s tired. You can celebrate the years passed while still being good-spirited.
50 is the golden anniversary for marriages, and it should be golden for anyone celebrating that birthday as well. Decorate a cake in lavish gold, or at least with shiny yellow to emphasize the importance of the day. Search for “edible gold leaf” online and you can find something in your price range for decorating purposes. If real gold, because that is indeed what it is, is beyond your reach, then yellow or faux gold decorating items and icings can also be found.
You can celebrate simply by baking cakes in the shape of a 5 and a 0. If you cannot find these specifically shaped pans online, a local crafts or baking store might have them. If you can’t find special pans, you can just bake a round cake for the 0 (cutting out the middle) and a square cake that you cut into a 5 shape. Or you can bake a large sheet cake and create the numbers in icing, stencil them on with sprinkles or replicate them over and over with small pre-made sugar numbers. Just make sure the numbers are boldly decorated. This is an age worth remembering.
Another cake to create is one that celebrates the year that the person was born. A simple Internet search should yield results on events that happened 50 years ago. Using black icing, create the front page of a newspaper touting the news of the day including the birth of your friend or loved one. Or you can re-create the poster of a movie, an invention or a sports event from that year.
You can good naturedly tease through your cake decoration by showing how much things have changed. Look up the price of a gallon of gas 50 years ago and use that as your cake slogan, for example, “In 1961, gas cost 31¢ a gallon – and Barry was born!”
If you don’t want to do your own decorating, consider using a photo reproduction. Most bakeries have the printing capability. Find a photo of the 50 year old as a child and get it printed in icing on the cake. A photo of the birthday kid at their own party some 40 or 35 years ago would surely be a hit.
Highlight how many candles are going on the cake by making 50 distinct stars out of colored icing and place a candle in each spot. Or to emphasize the years, you could bake 50 cupcakes and place a candle in each one.
The simplest way to emphasize the enormity of turning 50 is to bake cakes in the shape of an exclamation point. Just use a rectangular sheet cake slightly trimmed with a round cake for the period. And wow! It’s a cake that conveys the excitement of a birthday worth celebrating.
