Winter the Dolphin on her Floaty

Since my daughter’s second birthday, I have been making her “character” cakes; sometimes two because she is a 4^th of July baby and her friends can’t come for the “family” party. After Micky Mouse, a turtle, and a fish, she raised the bar this year. My daughter LOVES the movie “Dolphin Tale” about Winter, the dolphin with a prosthetic tail. For her fifth birthday, she wanted a Winter (without her tail) floating on her floaty as her cake because it’s her favorite part of the movie.  Oh, and she wanted it to be chocolate and vanilla cake with a pink floaty. My rules are that I can use a boxed cake mix, but I must make my own frosting. I also don’t like fondant, so I stay away from that as much as I can. All the decorating is done with the butter cream.

I found this website with a template for cutting out the dolphin from two 9in rounds. So, I shrunk it down (because that would have been a really big dolphin on a floaty.) Instead of using the rounds, I baked two 13×9 in cakes, leveled and staked them with butter cream, and froze them. I shrunk the template down to fit a 6 inch round, put it together and cut it out of the 13 x 9. The floaty was made in chocolate using 2 cake mixes in a 15 x 10 pan. I cut a lot of it away, but it was the only way I could figure out how to get my corners from burning. So then the template went on the chocolate cake, and cut out the dolphin again, although I threw out that part this time. Everything got crumb coated, and then the decorating began – pink for the floaty, grey blue for the dolphin and blue and white swirl for the water. I also used the Wilton Color Mist spray in Pearl to give Winter a little shine, like she had just come out of the water. Writing on cakes is not a strong point, but at least it is legible. I tried to get creative with the writing of her name by making it look like she had written it, but it just made it look out of place. I wasn’t going to ruin my pink icing by taking it off. So it stayed.  

Since I decorated the cake into the wee hours of the morning, she didn’t get to see it until her Dolphin Swim party. She loved it. Next year, it’s a football party (or so I’m told…)

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