How to make a fondant penguin topper

Today I’m going to show you how to make the penguin toppers from Ava’s cake. To learn how to make the scalloped top to the cake see this tutorial.

Apologies in advance for the quality of these pics, but I’d had a tiring weekend and wasn’t really in the mood for making these, so I was moulding the penguins whilst watching crappy reality tv (I think I’ve found the lowest of the low in Geordie Shore…)

I have my tylo powder, white fondant, black fondant and also my oval cutters and toothpicks.

… and my sketch of the cake

I made 5 penguins which I was going to put on the cake, but in the end I used 3 and put one on the cupcakes and the last one broke.

Start by adding your tylo powder to the black and white fondant (1/2 teaspoon per 250g) and then rolling out circles for the penguin heads and ovals for the body

Roll out your white fondant thinly and cut out ovals and then attach them to the penguin body using some water

I wanted to use white hearts for the face, but didn’t have a heart cutter large enough, so I used my flower cutter and cut the heart that way (so resourceful of me!)

Add a toothpick/dry pasta into the body, dab some water on top and attach the head.

Make a hole with your toothpick at the bottom of the penguin so that you can easily attach the penguin to your cake when it hardens (I always prefer to be able to ‘spike’ my fondant toppers into the cake)

Cut out a black oval for the arms and using the same oval cutter, cut both sides of the oval.

Attach the arms to the penguin and then rest the arms against something (I’ve used a combination of cutters, the side of my tray, the snowman and a small rolling pin) so that the arms will dry curved.

Leave the penguins to dry for at least 24 hours.

To make the beaks, roll out small orange tear shaped balls and then using sharp scissors, cut the pointy end.

Draw on the eyes using a black edible marker and then attach the beak using some water or edible glue.

I then dressed up the penguins with scarfs (thin strips of fondant), ear muffs (thin strip of fondant over the head and two small flattened balls of fondant) and flowers (I used a mini blossom cutter).

The snowman was simply two balls of fondant (I used a toothpick the same way as for the penguins), a red scarf (thin strip of fondant), a tear drop shaped nose, drawn on eyes and buttons and the stick arm is actually two toothpicks which I coloured black (using my edible marker) and superglued the two together to get the ‘twig’ effect