Manatee Birthday Cake

Manatees are gentle giants of the shallow sea and river tributaries, which is why my sister-in-law requested a manatee cake for her husband's birthday.  She let us choose the design and flavor of cake, but also said that in addition to the manatee, it would be fun to have a dolphin and a baby manatee on top.  I wasn't quite sure how it would all come together, but I was up for a challenge.  We picked the cake flavor, Kahlua (one of our favorites), and my sister topped it with dark chocolate ganache and decorated the side with mini-chocolate chips, which I thought was really cute.

Now it was my turn.....I molded a manatee from fondant (my first time sculpting anything like this), and had to look up a picture on the internet to get the flippers and tail just right:

  

Creating the mini-manatee wasn't too hard since now I've already done it once, and I thought a pink bow would be perfect (the couple has a daughter).  For the dolphin, I was originally going to mold only part of a dolphin and have it's head pop out of the water, but I wasn't quite satisfied with how it looked (even though my husband told me it was amazing), so I made another one.  After dusting the animals with edible luster, I put rock candy pebbles on top of the cake and added blue luster around the creatures and rocks to create a watery effect.  

The birthday sign was first piped onto wax paper and the writing piped in chocolate, and once it was dry, I thought it was pretty clever to prop it up on the cake with more candy rocks!

To many more Manatee Cakes, and Happy Birthday Alex!!!