Every year since my nephew turned four years old I have been the one to put together his birthday cake. Over time he has become more specific about the design he expects, so it usually becomes a co-creation. My nephew gives me his absurdly complicated requests and I try to simplify it down to a manageable cake idea.

As I am getting ready to tackle this year’s cake for his 7th birthday (Star Wars here we come!) I want to share last year’s design. He wanted a “manchot” cake. Manchot is the French word for Auks, which resemble penguins (technically the difference is that Auks fly). Since my nephew is not around to correct me, I present to you my penguin-themed cake.

Coming up with a cake design

This was the initial drawing of the cake my nephew and I came up with:

Making Penguins in Fondant

To make the penguins I used black gum paste combined with white and orange fondant for the details. I used Wilton balls for the black eyes. A tip that made my life much easier was to weight how much black gum paste I was using for each penguin. That way I was pretty much guaranteed they would be all the same size.

I also followed this youtube tutorial by Cake Dutchess to help me along.

I was super proud of how cute they came out and it was not too difficult to build these figurines.

Since penguins live in cold climates, I decided to add some snowflakes to the cake. I ordered off of Amazon plungers with 6 different snowflake styles. I also used white Wilton balls to give them a more elegant look.

Baking the cake and whipping the frosting

The actual cake was my trusty vanilla cake from Ricardo layered with a chocolate cake. It’s perfect for stacking because the cake is dense but still moist. The filling was a dairy-free swiss meringue buttercream with fresh strawberries. For the outside of the cake, I covered it with crisco-based vanilla frosting so that it would hold up to heat.

The Final Penguin-themed Cake

I added in some fun details to the cake with snowballs, and green hat on one of the penguins. The original design was suppose to have “ice” but after two attempts of melting sugar, I was always left with a yellow-is tinge that clashed with the snow white fondant.

Overall, my nephew loved the cake and at the end of the day that’s what counts. It tasted pretty good too!