Rubber Ducky Cake

I found a Wilton Rubber Ducky cake pan on eBay. I am so glad I found this and will keep it in my collection...I have a feeling this will be one well-used pan!

It seemed a little tricky to use with all the explicit directions but I followed them to the letter and the cake turned out great. The only thing I would change is that while it is cooling "for four hours" (according to the directions), I would have flipped the cake over on each side every 15 minutes, back and forth, because I laid it on one side, per the directions, and once I removed the cake from the pan, one side of the head did not match the shape of the other side and I needed to re-shape slightly with a knife.

I covered the cake board with orange fondant to match the duck's beak and I trimmed it with a yellow ribbon to match the duck. I cut a piece of blue fondant and actually rolled it into the orange so that I would have a little "lake" for the duck to sit on. Like a genius--not!--I put blue piping gel on top of the blue and then of course, the duck cake kept sliding, which I did not expect. So I ended up using an extruder with blue gum paste and outlined the lake to keep the blue piping gel in place. Once I refrigerated the duck, though, it seemed to harden up and not be an issue!

I just used star tips for the entire duck cake except for his beak and eyes. I first did a light coat of yellow buttercream before I dotted the stars on, then added the beak and eyes, and started my stars after the fondant pieces were in place. The reason I added a light layer of yellow buttercream all over was because sometimes when you do a cake covered in stars from a star tip, you can see the cake underneath if there are any spaces at all and I didn't want white cake showing underneath. This way the color was yellow everywhere.

I did NOT cut the cake to put icing in the middle. Maybe I could have but I wasn't sure if cutting the duck in half and adding a soft filling would cause a problem. I also figured that there was so much buttercream on the outside that whoever was eating a piece of cake would have enough icing.

This is the perfect cake for a little one's birthday, or to use as an extra cake for a baby shower, especially if you're doing cupcakes and need a cake on top of a stand. Enjoy! It was really easy and really fun to make!