Not everyone can afford a fancy decorated cake or an elaborate theme cake, but everyone wants to make sure that whatever birthday cake they get for that special loved one is a cake that is striking or beautiful. So how do you accomplish that while keeping impressive cake decorations at low cost? Well for starters, you can try looking away from exclusive party supply stores where you'll probably pay three times the regular price for a birthday candle!

An ordinary cake can literally be transformed before your eyes just by using simple cake decorations. No matter if the cake is a regular circular shaped cake or some hybrid quadrangle shape because your home experiment didn't turn out as expected, there are always cake decorations that can enhance or 'fix', as it were, what would have been an otherwise simple or scary cake. Just use your imagination!

Edible candles are a great inexpensive way to light up a cake, literally, and are available at most supermarkets or retail outlets. These candles are made mostly of colored candy except for a little bit of the top which is the actual and probably even the world's smallest candle. These candles can be fully inserted into the cake covering the entire top of the cake so when lit, the cake looks like a bit flame. And the best part is that since candy filly the inside of the cake, it adds a little extra surprise.

Speaking of candy, you should not underestimate the decorating potential of low costing, everyday sweets. Because of the wide range of candy there is to choose from, decorating a birthday cake for anyone, young or old, easy-going or serious minded, can be not only one of the most inexpensive way to decorate a birthday cake, but also the easiest! All you have to do is think about the person the cake is for, the type of candy they like and how well you can make it into something unique that the birthday boy or girl will love.

Now candy and chocolate are two different types of birthday cake decorations simply because there are some things you can do with candy that can't be done with chocolate, and there are some things you can do with chocolate that you definitely cannot do with candy! Chocolate is versatile and easy to work with, not to mention it comes in many different flavors and prices that you can choose from. Chunks of dark chocolate can be used on top of a white frosted cake, or it can be melted into a liquid form and drizzled across the cake to give it a very gourmet look.

What's more is that you can actually make a chocolate cake...literally! By taking different slabs and slices of chocolate, you can design a house shaped chocolate cake, an animal shaped cake or any design that you can think of. The variety of things that can be done to decorate birthday cakes with something as inexpensive and common as chocolate is limitless and in fact it is one of the most used materials in cake decorating and no doubt it is one of the most loved as well.

Finally, with regards to birthday cake decorations, other frequently used materials are flowers. They are possibly the lowest costing decoration that can be used on a cake, especially a birthday cake for an older person, since it can cost as little as zero dollars! Regular garden flowers can be used so long as it's free from insect defect and cleansed well which can be done by rinsing them in hot water. Flowers can be used as they are as inedible decorations for cakes, but there are some flowers that can be used as cake decorations that are edible. These are usually very inexpensive petals and depending on the design or theme of the cake, these petals can be sugar-coated to give a shimmering effect, or the effect of droplets of water.

So now that you've found yourself some very low cost birthday cake decorating ideas you can combine your new knowledge with your creativity and be amazed at the results!