I've been asked to do a sandcastle cake for a little girls birthday, I found a really cute one on the Wilton website that uses brown sugar for the sand, it looks really cool but I wonder how that would make the cake taste. I was thinking about putting some graham crackers in the food processor and using those, but wanted to find out if anyone had done this before and what they used for the sand.

This is a picture of the Wilton cake:

I've made a couple of cakes that needed sand (a golf course, a beach) and have used brown sugar. The majority of the cake was still just buttercream, so not the entire cake was covered in brown suger. I never had any complaints from anyone - they loved the effect. I still had buttercream under the "sand" so I guess folks can scrape off the sugar if they don't want it. For kids though - they think all sugar is good!

Bakerella used the teddy grahams in the food processer and they looked really good, like sand - I have always wondered about the brown sugar and the taste!

bakerella.blogspot.com - look for her beach cupcakes.

i only use grahm crackers sprinkled on for sand and EVERY time i get comments on how good it is mixed with the bc (when I was a little girl we use to make sandwiches with grahm crackers filled with bc...YUM!)

Only problem with brown sugar is that it gets hard, I have done it, but I liked the processed cookies better, can use Nila wafers, chocolate graham crackers, a mixture of them, anything like that. They don't get hard.

I am amazed at how smooth and consistent they got the sand on that cake - gotta be some airbrushing going on with that picture!

I mix vanilla wafers and brown sugar--it tasted delicious!

Thanks so much for all the great ideas, I was thinking that the graham crackers and the BC would taste pretty good.

I made some "sand" for a flip flop cake I did, and I mixed brown sugar and graham crackers together. I guess the mixture helps the brown sugar form clumping up. Worked great for me! Good Luck!

I always use the Nilla Wafers, brown sugar and a bit of the granulated sugar, and I think the color always came out great and the taste isnt too bad either. I have a friend that uses Graham crackers with granulated sugar and a little of brown sugar, and that is pretty good too. It just depends on what color of sand you are going for, at least in my opinion. I love the sand castle cakes they are so cute!!!

Sincerely,
Veronica

I saw on one of the cake challenges, Norman used cake scraps, popped them in the oven to toast up, then crushed those. It looked like sand and they said it tasted like crunchy pieces of cake, yummy!! I am going to try it when I get a beach cake order. If anyone tries it let me know how it comes out!!! Thanks!

HTH
Jessica