No-fondant figures!!

Bryony Instone’s elegant meringue swans

Apart from the odd schnauzer, I nearly always turn down requests for novelty cakes, because I never use fondant and I think that anyone who wants to eat a handbag or a motorbike expects their birthday cake to have that flawless sugarpaste finish that they see on supermarket cakes. That’s up to them.

But, inspired by Facebook group member Bryony Instone’s beautiful meringue flamingo cake, I thought I’d have a rummage on Pinterest for other examples of figurative work that bakers have achieved without modelling. Here’s what I found.

Piped meringue octopi and unicorns: so cute!

Clever bakers everywhere are piping beautiful characters, not just with meringue, but with cookies, macarons and of course buttercream. Imagine how adorable these unicorns would look on a pastel drip cake: thanks bye enormous golden fondant horn!

Meringue baby dinosaur lollipops: perfect party favour

Or how about topping a cake with meringue or cookie lollipops? Your grateful customer can smugly hand them out at the end of their kid’s party in place of a party bag bursting with overpriced landfill. Maybe supply cellophane bags with logo stickers for this.

Turkey cupcakes: piping creates bags of character in a face and takes seconds

| SO hate fondant on novelty cupcakes. Seriously, you’ve made a thing to eat and over half of it will taste of plastic and you’ve had your hands all over it yuk. But so many characters can be piped with buttercream. If you look on the piping techniques section of the Wilton website, there are hundreds of animals and even people, all simply piped with a plain round tip. This penguin is full of character. Obviously edge your customer towards choosing animals with bulbous bodies and very short legs but if they must have monkeys or giraffes, pipe them onto the side of a cake, or use lolly sticks for legs like this stork. I imagine the body is piped with ABC and left to crust but you could pipe it with meringue.

Fortunately most of the cute animals have fat little bodies and very short legs

I’m not sure how this stork’s body doesn’t slide down his legs, very clever

I’m very bad at meringues. Even simple meringue kisses reduce me to tears with their belligerent cracking, crazing, oozing and collapsing. So my figure work is limited to what I can pipe with buttercream. This jungle cake took minutes. It doesn’t bear close scrutiny but the recipient was one and past his bedtime so i was spared any inquiry into what species of monkey etc.

None of these animals even lives in the jungle

Furry animals are super quick and easy; I use a big grass tip for dog cakes and cupcakes. Ashamed to admit I’ve used edible eyes from the supermarket in a rush but white chocolate chips work well and dark chocolate drops (not chips, the old fashioned drop shaped little chocolates) make perfect animal noses if you push them in sideways.

Ignore the edible eyes. A low point

I’d love to see your piped figure work. Pop it in the comments or feel free to add to my Pinterest board (link above). I’ll be adding more as I find them.