10 EASY Animal Cake Techniques with NO Fondant

Here are 10 techniques to create adorable animal cakes with no fondant

To paint an animal onto a cake, you can use the gel food colours you would use to tint buttercream

They're quick to use because all you have to do is squeeze a few drops onto a plate or palate and add a few drops of vodka

or any other clear alcohol or clear flavour extract. To make a pastel colour, add white icing colour to the gel

Chill your cake in the fridge first for at least an hour to set the frosting so it's firm

and then paint your animal onto the frosting. For very bold colours like this brown, use mostly gel with just a tiny bit of vodka added

Or for thinner coverage to make lighter shades, just add more vodka to thin out the colour

The alcohol will evaporate after a few seconds, but it's useful to make your paintbrush slide easily over the frosting

I like to start with an outline and then fill in the middle, just like you would do if you were drawing a picture

It's helpful to have a few different paintbrushes so that you don't have to clean them as you switch back and forth between colours

and it's also much easier to do this if you have a picture to refer to. I use Google Images and choose a clip art image of whatever I want to paint

printing it out and referring to it while I'm painting. You can paint animals with buttercream instead of gels for added texture

Put a few colours of buttercream onto a plate and you'll need a paintbrush and an offset spatula or a palette knife too

Outline your animal onto a frosted cake using a toothpick and then paint the shape with buttercream

just like you would paint with acrylic paints. Honestly, I've never painted anything, but I took a class on Skillshare called Acrylic Painting

Learn the Basics for Beginners, by Lorraine Gonzalez, and picked up some tips to use on this cake

Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people

Explore new skills, deepen existing passions, and get lost in creativity. There are classes on lots of different skills you can use in your cake designs

like illustration and different styles of painting. Skillshare is designed specifically for learning so there are no ads, and it's less than $10 a month with an annual subscription

This video is sponsored by Skillshare and I've partnered with them so that the first 1,000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a free trial of premium membership, so you can explore and get inspired

Brush on some shading with a darker shade of the same colour and add accents with different colours if you like To add texture and to clarify which parts of the buttercream are which parts of the elephant use your paintbrush or a toothpick to gently scratch lines where the elephant

skin has creases or wrinkles. Buttercream is fun to play around with and it's convenient because you

already have it from frosting your cake, so you can tint the leftover's different colors to use

for painting. Instead of painting, pipe your animal onto a cake using any piping tip. Start by outlining

your shape with a cookie cutter or use a toothpick to score the outline into the frosting like we did with the previous animal and then use piping to cover the shape

Choose a piping tip small enough to be able to stay within the outline, especially around the

smaller details like the feet and the ears. Otherwise the outline of the animal won't be clear

and it might be difficult to tell which animal it is. For more detail you can use sprinkles

for a quick and colourful addition. To add much more detail to your animal, spread the

face on first to create a flat surface even if the frosting on your cake is textured

like this pink frosting. Pipe on the fur with any piping tip like a grass tip for long shaggy fur

or for this llama I'm using a 1M star tip to pipe little stars and rosette swirls

Add details like ears by piping or spreading frosting, or do both

The more colors and textures you add, the more detailed and interesting the design will be

For the face, use gel food color and a paintbrush to paint on a nose, mouth, and eyes

Using a small paintbrush will allow you to add really tiny details like eyelashes

Use pink gel color thinned out with vodka to brush on some rosy cheeks

Transferring your animal onto the cake by first piping it onto parchment paper

will create a perfectly flat shape and it means you can trace a picture

instead of drawing something free hand. You'll need a small round piping tip like a number three or a number four

and after piping the smaller details, like this giraffe's face, spots and horns

put the parchment in the freezer for five minutes to set and then pipe on the background colour

and because the details have frozen and hardened, you won't blend the colours together as you spread this colour flat

Pick the parchment up and press the piped animal against the frosting on your cake, and then put the cake in the fridge for an hour to set the animal

My four-minute buttercream works really well for this because it gets very, very firm when it's cold

Peel the parchment off leaving the animal behind on the cake. For a 3D animal you need to sculpt a cake which is much easier than you might think sketch your animal either the top view or the side view or both for the most accuracy Cut the animal out and then assemble your cake by alternating cake and filling

and spread buttercream between any cake layers that you want to attach to each other

Place your sketch on the cake, either on top or hold it up against the side

and trim around it with a serrated knife like a bread knife. Save the ts because next you'll add the details, attaching those cake ts

like I'm doing for this dog's head. Carve out details like these hind legs

When you're happy with the shape, cover the whole thing in a thin layer of frosting

a crumb coat, and while that sets, pipe details on to parchment paper like eyes and a nose with black buttercream

Put these in the freezer to chill and harden. You can pipe the white parts of the eyes and then attach the black pupils if you want to

Pipe any other details you want to add, like this flower I'm going to add to the dog's collar

If your animal has a collar, add that before piping on the fur, using a ribbon tip

Then pipe the fur on, working your way across the animal. If you're using more than one colour, it's helpful to have a piping bag and tip for each colour of frosting

so you can switch between the colours easily. For details that you want to stick up, like the tail, pipe another layer on top to give it some height

Piping the fur gives it a realistic shaggy texture, but it's time consuming

A quicker way to add texture is to sculpt your cake, to sculpt your cake and then cover it with a crumb coat and a final coat of frosting and then

use a zigzag cake comb to imprint grooves in the frosting that look like fur. I've used the same

technique to pipe and transfer the eyes and nose onto this sloth and I'm adding some shadows

around the arms to make them stand out from the body by spreading on some darker brown butterahrem

and blending it in slightly with the end of a paintbrush. Improvise and use whatever tools you have

available. If sculpting a cake looks like too big of a project, using cupcakes is a really

quick and easy way to make adorable little animals. Stack cupcakes with a layer of filling in

between them and then cover the stacked cupcakes with a crumb coat of frosting to catch any

crumbs and to lock the moisture into the cake. Then pipe fur onto your animal using whatever

piping tip and technique you like. I'm piping these ribbons with a number 104 petal tip

with the narrow end pointing outwards and the wider end pressed against the crumb coat

Make easy eyes with marshmallows cutting a thin piece off each end and to make it smaller cut a circle out of it with the end of a piping tip Poke a hole in the middle of each piece of marshmallow and then press a chocolate chip into the hole so that the flat base of the chocolate chip becomes the middle of the eye

Press these into the frosting fur on the cake and you have a little animal, or a monster in this case

To cut your animals out of buttercream, spread buttercream onto parchment and smooth it with your offset spatula or a frosting smoother

Put it in the freezer for at least 10 minutes to chill it so it gets very hard and then you can cut shapes out of it with cookie cutters

Pull away the surrounding buttercream, freeze the shapes for another five minutes so they get very hard again

and then lift them up and press them into the frosting on your cake

You can curve them around the cake by wrapping them with parchment paper and then let the cake sit at room temperature for a few minutes

so that the buttercream shapes start to warm up and soften, and then you can press them gently through the parchment paper to wrap them around the cake so that they sit

flat against it. Put the cake in the fridge or freezer for a few minutes for the shapes to harden

again and then peel the parchment paper off. To create an animal by adding its features to a plain

round cake, melt candy melts, or use white chocolate and then add oil-based gel colors to tint it

Spread the chocolate onto parchment paper as thinly as you can and smooth it with your offset

spatula or a frosting smoother. I'm piping yellow spots to place on the frosting of the cake

which will be my dinosaur's skin. Freeze the chocolate for five minutes

and then use a sharp knife to cut out the pieces you need. These orange triangles will be the dinosaur spikes

and these white triangles will be its teeth. Pipe two white circles of chocolate

or use entire candy melts and then use an edible black pen to draw on the pupils

or use a paintbrush and some black gel color. Frost your cake and immediately afterwards

while the frosting is still soft and sticky, press the features into the frosting

You can draw, details like a smile with a sharp knife in the frosting. The chocolate details will stick

to the fresh frosting and when the frosting sets it will secure them in place. This technique

is quicker and easier than sculpting a cake but the result is just as cute. I hope this

video has given you some fun ideas to try. Please tag British Girl Bakes and your photos on

Instagram so I can see your creations. Thanks for watching! The