I am NOT a professional baker. I am not even a home baker who does lots of orders. Silly me I committed to making a 3D duck cake for a friends son's first birthday. FIRST birthday! I must have been out of my mind.

I tried baking a test cake tonight (the real one is due Sunday) and thank goodness I did. I thought I would just try doing in White Almond Wedding cake to see if that would be stable enough for a 3D cake. I just took it out of the oven and it is not good. Even though I filled the bottom of the pan all the way to the rim like the instructions say it did not rise to fill the top. It only rose maybe half an inch. Definitely not enough to look like a duck. So now I am sitting in my kitchen in the middle of the night stressing about this cake. I keep thinking that the 1st birthday cake lives on in pictures for someone's entire life. I can't even imagine the stress of doing a wedding cake!

Can someone please help me with this? What recipe would you use? Any other helpful hints? Please, please, please?

I have made this cake a couple of times (the unicorn and the yoda in my photos)...each time I have used a regular cake and added a box if instant pudding and an extra egg to give it the extra stability it needs to hold it's shape. I recommend actually measuring the batter into the duck rather than just filling it to the top (it says 5.5 cups of batter). A regular box mix makes like 5 cups of batter, and adding the egg and pudding it makes right around 6. My first problem with my duck was not getting a string tied tight enough around him to keep my rising cake from just lifting the lid off. I found if you use yarn it works really well. Don't worry, the 3D pans are hard to get right the first time, I promise the second time around will be much better. I hope that helps!

Are you making it from a Duck pan or free hand. I have done a free hand duck before and used some great instructions from one of Debbie Brown's books. If it is free hand let me know and I will try and retype the instructions for you. BTW I used a chocolate pound cake that held up beautifully.

Good luck

Carrie

I am using the Wilton 3D duck pan. I am going to try again today and I guess I will keep making one until I get it right.

THe duck cake is pretty easy... just use a cake mix, honey. Its not the end of the world and your stress over perfect, perfect, perfect is giving you premature aging! Stop it! I taught Wilton classes for seven years. I always told my students, perfection is for God, not cake decorators, so stop thinking your items will be perfect. They will be lovely and your heart will show in them. Thats enough. As for the duck pans I did the duck cake many times and I liked pound cake mixes best, they are most stable. Use Wilton spray on no stick stuff (cant remember the name) and let that cake sit in the pan until cooled enough before removing. Then turn it out onto a board, and lay a rack on the flat side of the cake that is facing up. Then, holding both board and rack firmly, flip it over so the cake cools right side up and DO NOT TOUCH it unti it is stone cold. Attach the pieces together with buttercream made with meringue powder for extra stick, and let it set a couple of hours. Then ice with a thin consistency crumb coat of the same thinned icing, and let THAT dry. THEN, begin attaching star tip icing in medium consistency to completely cover the bird. Add details and you are done.
If that all seems way to difficult for you, why not make a candymold duck with white chocolate or Wilton Candymelts or some other brand. Then stick the mold on a sheet cake and stop stressing over it.
Hugs and best wishes to you,
Michelle

One more thing... don't assume that your cake mix or recipe makes enough batter to fill the pan. Take your pans and measure the amount of liquid it takes to fill it to the brim, adding in a cup of water (or a fraction thereof) at a time until you fill them. Then subtract 1/3 of the total amount of water volume it takes to fill the pans. The amount of water volume left is the correct amount of cake batter to fill the pans. In other words, if you fill your cake pan with six cups of water, then you subtract one third (2 cups) and you know that four cups of water is the correct amount of batter for that pan.