How to make a Whale Birthday Cake {Orangeville Photographer}

This blog posting is dedicated to all of those busy mom’s out there who have faced the “you can do it mom I want  homemade decorated cake because it tastes better” mommy-guilt ridden moments and survived. 🙂

How to Make a Whale Birthday Cake

1.  Step One

Bake the cake – choose your favourite flavours.  Caitlyn loves vanilla so her cake was almost all vanilla with a chocolate tail.  I used a 9 x 13 for the base, an 8 x 8 for the tail and 2 halves of a ball shaped cake for the head.  I made them ahead of time and froze the cake to make it easier to cut and ice.

2.  Step Two

Ice the base layer in your favourite blue water colour.  You will notice as the photos progress that my blue waters starts off very blue but ends up being more a turquoise colour.  This is because when I mixed the 2nd layer of icing up with the food colouring I did not pay attention to the number of drops and voila …. the water is now turquoise. 😉

Base of the whale birthday cake

3.  Step Three

Cut the fluke shape from the square cake and assemble all of the pieces.  Use one solid ball cake and slice and dice the second one to try and make a tear drop shape for the whale head.  Do not attempt to stand the tail up (no matter how many toothpicks and skewers you use the weight of the cake will cause it to crack, fall and create an overall massive mess ….. lucky for me I had cut my fluke in half and I had a spare 😉

cut the fluke shape using a template to trace.

assembling the pieces of the cake

…… Don’t give up …… It was at this point where I felt WAY over my head and was in tears looking at my watch saying there is still time to make a run to the grocery store to get a cake.  My 9 year old was holding my hand telling me it’s ok mommy it looks great so far it is going to be fabulous.  Which of course made me cry more.  My 12 year old was in hiding from trying to be helpful and not able to manage the drama.  We all went to our separate corners, I had a glass of wine and called in recruits – aka Grandma. 🙂

4.  Step Four

Proceed with icing the whale.  My cake became a crumbly mess.  Ultimately what worked was to put the cake into the freezer with it’s crumb coat on – then apply the second coat when it was frozen.  Smooth using a knife dipped into water, drink a glass of wine and hope for the best.

ice and decorate to suit

5.  Step Five

Decorate as you please.  I found yogurt dipped blueberries sliced in half made perfect eyeballs and shoestring licorice for the  mouth.  The remainder was a careful application of decorating glitter and voila – your passable Whale Birthday Cake.