Summer Cake

I am in the middle of creating five cakes.  My son's teacher asked me to bring in a cake to celebrate all the summer birthdays.  I'm sure I could have just bought one, but that would be too logical.  So I made this beach themed cake based on ones I saw on Pinterest.  (I cheated and used a King Arthur Flour cake mix and I bought ready made Betty Crocker frosting.)  I think I spent more time tracking down drinks umbrellas and gummy rings than I did on the rest of the cake.

The sand is made from a mixture of graham crackers and brown sugar, pulsed in the food processor until it looks like sand.  I used the same idea to make the kids' pirate treasure map cake last summer.

The tricky thing will be transporting the cake safely to school.  I read a tip about putting a larger cardboard ring around the cardboard that the cake is sitting on.  I had cut the cardboard base out of a pizza box, so I just cut a ring around the circle I had already cut out.  Simple.