Building a Driftwood Cake Display

Check out how to make a cupcake display using driftwood and wood slices! A natural and nautical party display!

As you know, we were going for a "nautical" look to our wedding decor with all of the decorations we made. Since the cake is often the center of attention at a wedding, at least for some period of time, we had to make sure it fit with the theme as well.

Morgan had the great idea to build our cake display using driftwood from the beach, like we had done when I built our coffee table a couple years ago. She had some pretty good inspiration from Pinterest for me to work off of, too.

We decided to do cupcakes for our wedding cake instead of a traditional tiered cake. We both love cupcakes and wanted to give people lots of options for flavors instead of just one flavor that not everyone would like. So we needed to make our driftwood cake display so that it could hold lots of different layers of cupcakes.

DIY driftwood cake display

So we went to the beach and gathered driftwood. For some reason, I really didn't think I was going to be able to pull anything off this time like I had with the table. This just seemed more difficult because there had to be multiple platforms and I had no vision.

But I started out by building a sturdy base like I did with the table. That is always step one. From there, I would be able to build up.

At Christmas, my dad and I chopped down a dead tree in his backyard and sliced some of the trunk into even pieces about an inch and a half thick. These would be used as the platforms for the cupcakes.

After I had the base, I basically just started adding random pieces of the driftwood in a fashionable way and made sure that each slice of wood had three contact points in order to stay level and solid.

I couldn't believe what I was able to come up with.

Then, it was just a matter of screwing and wood gluing the platforms to each of their contact points. Some of the points that the platforms were resting on weren't big enough for a screw, so we placed a little bit of wood glue.

Finally, we sprayed bits of sand off using canned air, sealed the entire thing with polycrylic and voila!

We're so pleased with the way it turned out. It will fit the theme perfectly. Can't wait for everyone (including us!) to see it with cupcakes all over!