This is one of my very favourite designs. It's a cake that I iced for a Christmas party a couple of years ago. I can't take credit for the cake itself as my Nanna kindly bakes our family Christmas cakes each year. The cheeky penguins are all mine though!
The fruit cake was matured with the occasional splash of cognac for a number of weeks. A couple of days before the party I added a layer of marzipan and then a layer of regular sugarpaste. As well as being tasty the marzipan is quite stiff and helps to give a really good base for creating perfectly smooth icing on top. I'm a massive fan of the PME icing smoothers to smooth and polish the sugarpaste. On a fairly plain white cake such as this it really helps to have the icing looking pristine.
As usual when creating models I used Tylo powder to stiffen the paste to give an easy modelling consistency. Additionally edible glue was helpful to stick the different components together.
The penguins themselves were quite straightforward to make - being essentially based on two round balls. The flippers are a couple of smaller balls flatted out between thumb and finger. I used an edible ink pen to create the pupils of the eyes which helped to create their expressive and cheeky characters. To keep the penguins standing upright I inserted dry spaghetti into the model and down into the cake. You can't quite tell from the picture but the fish has been dusted with some edible gold lustre to give it a shimmery fish skin effect.
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