Birthday Cake With Candles Coloring Page

About this coloring page

A two-tier cake with icing swirls along the edges and five lit candles standing on top. The tiers and the icing are separate areas, so the cake can be striped, layered or given a different color on each level without any careful work. The candles are the detail children go to first and the part worth saving, because five thin shapes plus five flames is more fiddly than anything else on the page. This is an obvious one to print in a stack before a party: it costs almost no ink, every child produces a visibly different cake from the same drawing, and it occupies the awkward stretch after they arrive and before anything organised begins. Print birthday coloring sheets well before the day rather than on the morning, and put out a limited set of colors rather than a full box. The candles are the one place a child can make the drawing specific: five of them on the page, but nothing stops a child coloring only as many as they are turning, and a cake with the right number on it gets kept rather than recycled.

Color suggestions

• Chocolate tiers, white icing
• Pink and lilac layers
• Five candles in five colors
• Orange and yellow flames

Did you know?

• Putting candles on a cake and making a wish is often traced to eighteenth-century Germany, where children's birthday celebrations included a candle for each year plus one more for the year ahead.
• The song Happy Birthday to You was claimed as copyrighted for decades, and only became free to sing publicly in the United States after a court ruling in 2016.