i just copied and pasted this entire post onto my blog...please just copy and paste my face onto the body of the little girl, Elnora below, and you will have ME a happy girl with nothing more than a DONUT cake making her grin from ear to ear!!! i don't think anything could make me happier either! i love DONUTS! any kind of them, seriously... right now i am going nuts thinking where can i get some, krispy kreme, the donut shop up the street, a package of donetts from the store...any kind i am craving them so bad...i am sure the pregnancy has a little to do with it, but i know myself too well, only a little to do with it.

How to Make a Donut Cake (and keep a birthday girl happy)

By Jennifer

The funny thing about being a parent? You never know what the next challenge will be. One day you’re baking cookies for a school bake sale, the next day you’re telling your preschooler to stop chasing the dog with the shopping cart. A week later, you might find yourself removing stickers from the INSIDE of your sock and wondering how the heck that’s even possible.

This week? Well, this week I was faced with a 5 year old who decided she did NOT want the princess cake I’d been planning and instead would rather have donuts.

“I don’t like cake, can I please, please, PLEASE have donuts for my birthday?”

Yes, I could have just stuck a candle in the top of a glazed donut, but where’s the fun in that? So I sat myself down at the computer and started hunting ideas for a cake made of donuts. Unfortunately, the only thing I really found was the donut equivalent of a “cupcake cake” with tiers of donuts stacked together and some decorations added.

No thanks.

Behold…the Delight of the Donut Cake!

So I made it up on my own and while it wasn’t exactly what I’d envisioned, it was still pretty darn cool.

Elnora and her donut cake

Everyone else seemed to like it as well. It took about 20 minutes of thinking to figure out a strategy and then about 15 minutes to actually assemble it. All in all, way less work than the tiered princess dress cake I’d planned on making.

That said, donuts aren’t cheap around here, so the darn thing still cost me $14. The princess cake would have been a fraction of that.

Interested in how I made it? It’s super simple.

How Many Donuts Does it Take to Make A Donut Cake?

Answer: More than they have at Giant Eagle.

My kids love donuts from Giant Eagle, one of our local supermarkets, so when I picked them up from preschool we headed that way to pick out donuts for the cake. Unfortunately I walked up to the bakery counter a half step behind a woman who literally cleaned out their inventory.

Nice.

So we piled back into the car and headed to Mary Anne donuts, maker of some of the best (and most expensive) donuts I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating. I stood in front of their glass cases trying to calculate dimensions in my head on how I’d assemble this pastry puzzle.

A few minutes and a $5 coupon later, I walked out the door with half a dozen cream sticks, half a dozen large glazed donuts and a dozen assorted small cake donuts.

6 Cream Sticks, 6 Glazed and 12 Cake donuts

In looking at my donuts, I knew the glazed were my most logical choice for a central stacking point and I’d already decided I wanted to build outward to create a bit of a visual pattern. So I stood up a cream stick to measure height and found that three glazed donuts was just right for creating the center.

Use your largest width donut to create your central base.

Initially I was just stacking the cream sticks up against the donuts, but it quickly became clear that wasn’t going to cut it. They kept falling over. Nothing a few toothpicks wouldn’t solve…so I ran some toothpicks through the cream sticks and into the glazed donuts to hold them upright.

Use toothpicks to secure the outer donuts to your central base.

For the size glazed donuts I was using, it took six cream sticks. I could have fit seven, but I wanted to leave some space between them so I could work some of the other donuts into the design. That said, the cream sticks and the glazed donuts really looked nice on their own. I think if I was doing a larger donut cake, I might have used this as the top tier. (Keep in mind, you could also use vanilla or maple frosted cream sticks…or even ones with colored drizzle. I think I could have fun with a multi-tiered donut cake done with different flavors of frosting.)

The intial base for the donut cake.

This is when things got kind of challening… I stood at the counter for a good ten minutes just staring at the cake donuts…

Different color and flavor cake donuts so I could have some color variety.

My initial thought was to cut them all in half. Just seemed like I could get a better type of design going on that way. I wanted to add some additional “color” to the cake, so I pulled out the toothpicks again and stood them up between the cream sticks the whole way around.

Use toothpicks to secure half cake donuts to the central stacked donuts.

I was thinking variety, so I alternated three different types of donuts as I went around the cake. Once I was done, I wished I hadn’t. If I was building one again, I’d stick with a single color/flavor choice to build a more consistent look.

Next I added another ring of cake donuts along the outside, because everything was just looking far too vertical.

Adding a ring of cake donuts around the donut cake

Next I took the powdered sugar donuts and inserted them between the cream sticks at an angle onto the top of the donut cake. I had to use toothpicks again here to hold them in place, but honestly, once they were all tucked in with the cream sticks, they kind of all worked together to keep things in place anyway.

Adding the powdered sugar donuts. The consistent color of the white made me wish I'd only used the chocolate on the bottom and the cinnamon to ring the cake.

I added one final glazed donut to the top so you couldn’t see all the toothpicks, but if I was doing it again, I’d probably have used a chocolate frosted glazed donut with sprinkles, just to give it more color and personality. Either way, the glazed donut worked well because I could stick a votive candle right down in it.

Blowing out the candle on the donut cake

We had five adults and two kids at this party and to be honest…we decimated the cake. Sure, it was a bit piggy of us, but seriously folks, it was a donut cake! What do you expect?

The Destruction of the Donut Cake

And there you have it folks. The making of a donut cake.

Elnora went nuts over it, so it accomplished it’s purpose…but it was alot a lot of fun to make and generated a lot of conversation at the dinner table. If you’ve got a donut lover in your family, surprise them for their next birthday!