I made a great whale cake recently for a friend's birthday. I couldn't find anything to really help me out, so I made it up.
Here's what I did:
I bought a football shaped mould from a specialty baking store. It is rounded in the bottom, not flat, so it really rises up off the plate.
I baked a cake, a good rising one, not too dense. I cut off the tip of the "football" so my whale would have a squared off head.
I used the excess from the trimming to make small side fins.
I bought an easy to make fondant icing kit. (I could have made it myself but the kit was atually cheaper, you need a lot of stuff like glyceryne for this if you do it from scratch.) Fondant really finishes things off nicely with a satiny smooth finish. Much easier to work with than regular icing. I coloured most of the fondant using a pretty light blue food colour- more appetising than grey i think. I rolled out the fondant and tucked it into the folds of the cake.
I used excess fondant like moulding clay to create the tail, splashing high in the air.
I used a small amount of white fondant that I set aside with a chocolate chip in the centre for the eyes. I traced a line in the fondant for the mouth, then painted it in with a paint brush and red food colouring.
The finishing touch was for the 'blow hole'. For this, I melted 10-15 blue suckers in a pot, spread the syrup in line patterns and splashes in a glass bowl (a bowl to make some of the lines curved and not all flat). When dry, the syrup, though breakable (be careful!), was great to tuck into a small hole in the centre of the whale's back and created a really cool effect of splashing water! My friends were impressed.
To top it all off, I served the cake on a bed of chopped up blue jello.
I had so much fun making this, it was really worth the effort and looked fabulous in the end!
Enjoy. Cara