Adelie Penguin Cake

My brother recently celebrated a multiple-of-ten birthday, and my sister-in-law organized a surprise party for him. I don't know what made me look at airfares, but when I found they were ridiculously cheap, I decided to fly home to be part of the surprise.

Of course I felt honor-bound to create a cake. (As usual, skip to the end for specs and recipes.) But what design? Sister-in-law suggested: his whippet; a bicycle; his whippet riding a bicycle; a penguin. Given that bicycle and whippet riding a bicycle were way beyond my skills, I tried sketching the whippet (curled up, for ease of sculpture). I came up with a cute sketch, and was looking forward to decorating in all those shades of brown, but realized the whole concept was just gross - eating the family pet and all. So I tossed that, which left penguin.

I know how to do a penguin, but figured Charlie deserved an original. So I combed the web for pictures of other kinds of penguins. Adelie penguins were the obvious choice for sheer cute-power (although you have to admire the rockhoppers' attitude). Found an excellent photo (which I have now misplaced) of a penguin jumping, thought, "Wait, I've seen that before!" and found a penguin in exactly the same attitude in Mr. Popper's Penguins. Robert Lawson's illustrations are impressively true-to-life.*

I knew I was on my own for this design, since Matt was not accompanying me to St Louis. Intimidating, but also exhilarating to be able do everything exactly as I pleased. Plus, I had my mom for a sous chef and dad for a portraitist, so I wasn't completely without resources.

My brother didn't identify the cake as a penguin at first -- thought it might be the Doubtful Guest. An understandable mistake, but the lack of tennis shoes should have been a dead giveaway.

Design Process

I will include a wordy and picture-laden discourse on designing a cut-up cake in a future post. It would make this post excessively long.

Specs and Recipes

I used my usual chocolate sheet cake recipe from Cooks Illustrated (Issue 48, Jan 2001), and the same frosting recipes as for the emperor penguin. The white sour cream frosting recipe didn't make quite enough -- you would want to increase it, say one and a half times.

I poured unsweetened chocolate glaze over the assembled cake before frosting.



The feet are dried papaya spears, as is the beak. The feet are curved spears cut to appropriate thickness. The beak, of which I am particularly proud, I carved a little. Technically speaking, the feet ought to have had long black claws, but I decided that would be too distracting. A wee nubbin of licorice whip defines the chin.




The eye is a sugar eye I bought at Cookies for the cookie-making party. Orient the pupil carefully - it makes a real difference to the facial expression. Before you call me on it, yes, the pupil probably is made with food coloring. A white jordan almond with a dab of chocolate ganache would be truer to the manifesto (unless of course the candy coating is whitened with titanium dioxide, but at a certain point, I just stop asking).

The cake board is foam core covered with tinfoil and then waxed paper. I used a spatula to gently scrape off icing drips, and polished with a damp paper towel. Use the latter sparingly -- I managed to tear a hole in the dampened waxed paper by overly vigorous rubbing.


*I've ready MPP multiple times, but only this time made the connection that it has the same illustrator as The Story of Ferdinand. Once I realized that, I saw that Mr. Popper's grief-stricken posture near the end is exactly that of the frustrated toreador in Ferdinand. Um, yes, I am a children's literature geek.

Emperor Penguin Cake

This is the first cake Matt designed for me, and it remains one of his best efforts. He is particularly proud of how efficiently the design uses the cake.

The penguin is straight out of Antarctic Antics: A Book of Penguin Poems. This is one of our favorite books. Where else will you find poetry with rhymes like "can't you be" and "anchovies," or "featherweight" and "regurgitate"? Well, maybe here someday, but in general...

Other than keeping the pattern, we didn't document the first iteration very thoroughly. So when it came time to make a cake for a fundraising auction, I decided to dust this one off and refine it a bit. Well, I decided, and Matt ended up doing all the work while I was occupied with other auction preparations.

Actually, I did make the cake itself. It's the Black Mocha Cake from the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts. I hadn't made that recipe before, and it turned out to be tasty, but extremely moist - reminiscent of a pudding cake and not well suited to a cut-up cake. So we froze the bejeebers out of it, and it worked pretty well. (On the cake's little sign at the auction, we called it a "moist gateau," figuring that would have more cachet than "pudding cake.")

The cake is presented on a piece of plywood that is first covered with gray paper, and then waxed paper. This creates a nice icy effect, and the waxed paper is easy to clean up when the icing goes astray.

The cake is quite sweet, and when you add frosting, it teeters over the edge of too much. To reel it in a little, Matt crumbcoated the assembled cake with an unsweetened chocolate glaze (recipe below). He used a skewer to score lines into the glaze to mark the border between the white frosting and chocolate ganache that were applied next.



The "black" parts of the penguin are sour cream chocolate ganache (recipe below) - a lot of it. Matt used 10 ounces of chocolate. You could certainly use less without being accused of skimping, although it's easier to apply if you can spread it thickly.

After applying the ganache, Matt filled in the white belly with sour cream frosting (recipe below). I am grooving on sour cream frosting these days. It's an easy way to make truly white frosting, it's got a little tang to balance the sweetness, and (unlike butter-based frosting) it doesn't harden too much to spread when you put it in the fridge. The only difficulty with sour cream frosting is that it doesn't set up very well. So on a hot day the frosting is apt to sag and adds an extra layer of adipose tissue to your penguin's belly.



While cake turntables are a boon for frosting round layer cakes, they aren't much help for oblong cakes. But hunching over the table is no fun either. Brilliant innovation: put a cardboard box or other object of appropriate height on the table and place the cake board on top of that. You still have to be careful when turning the cake board, but it puts the cake at a much more comfortable height for frosting.

The beak is defined with a sliver of a spear of dried cantaloupe (you could also use dried papaya).

The eye is a white jordan almond dabbed with ganache for a pupil.

The ear patches are grated zest from about 1/4 of an organic orange (it's best to use organic fruit for making zest). Our Microplane grater does a beautiful job of citrus zesting. Regular zesters are also nice, but produce zest bits that are too coarse for this application.

The wings are defined with licorice whip.

The feet are dusted with a crushed graham cracker. The first time Matt made the cake, he used cocoa powder, which also worked well.

At the auction, one of my colleagues spoke wistfully about the idea of a husband who makes cake. It is a very good thing.

Chocolate Glaze

Use butter and unsweetened chocolate in a ratio of 1 tablespoon butter to 1 ounce chocolate. Matt made 6:6, but 4:4 would probably have been enough.

Melt butter and chocolate together over double boiler or in microwave. If microwaving, do something like 20% power in 3-4 minute increments. Start stirring once it's melted enough.

Drizzle the glaze over the cake, spreading it with a spatula as you go. You will probably need to reheat the glaze once or twice during the process.

Ordinarily it would be best to apply the glaze while the cake was on a cooling rack and then transfer the cake to a clean platter for serving. In the case of a cake assembled from multiple pieces (like, say, a penguin), or in the case of a fragile "moist gateau," you'll probably have to apply the glaze to the cake after it's already on its presentation board. You can clean up later by scraping the excess glaze off with a knife and then polishing up with a paper towel.

Sour Cream Chocolate Ganache

Melt as described in the chocolate glaze recipe:
10 ounces bittersweet chocolate (Matt used 8 oz bittersweet and 2 oz unsweetened chocolate because we didn't have enough bittersweet)

Beat in:
1 cup sour cream (Matt used 3/4 c sour cream and 1/4 c whipping cream because we didn't have enough sour cream)
1 1/2 tablespoons coffee liqueur

Add:
powdered sugar to taste (probably start with about 1/2 cup)

Sour Cream Frosting

Beat together:
3 tablespoons sour cream
1/2 pound (2 cups) powdered sugar

Add one or two more teaspoons of sour cream as needed to achieve the desired consistency. Don't add more or the frosting will be too runny to support itself.