This is the cake that I made for my little girls 2nd birthday party. It was a Old Macdonald farm theme so I decided to do a duck cake which she loved. As much as possible I like to use pudding basins to make animal cakes as I prefer the 3D effect to doing a flat cut out type. The base of the cake was a mud cake recipe which was not that great (as you can see from the photo) so I'd probably stick with a basic sponge next time.

I used a 2 litre pyrex bowl for the body and a 0.5 litre pyrex bowl for the head. I distorted a few cake cases in order to make cupcakes that were suitable for a beak, flippers and tail. I carved these to make them look right. I covered the mud cake body with ganache icing and once that had set I piped on buttercream feathers using a leaf tip ( ). I covered the head and tail with white cream cheese frosting (the cake was banana flavoured) and once that was fairly dry I fixed it on to the body using flat ended skewers which you can twist once they are inserted to stay in place. As you can see from the pic at this point I realised that the head was too high so I sliced of the top third of it. Then I covered the beak and flippers with orange buttercream and covered the head and tail with yellow butter cream feathers. A couple of chocolate Minstrels made perfect eyes. I'm really pleased with how it came out and I hope you give it a try. Let me know how you get on....

If you would like to create this or something similar in a one to one private lesson with me then call- 020 3573 9135