• A beautiful dolphin design will add a lot of fun to your gathering.dolphin image by Tabitha Little from Fotolia.com
  
  Dolphins are a fun and popular design for cakes at birthday parties, office parties and even weddings. A beautiful dolphin design is easy for the amateur cake maker to create, and will add a lot of fun to your gathering.
  
  

Make Your Own Pattern

• If you don't have a dolphin-shaped cake pan, you can make your own custom mold by using a large dolphin picture and aluminum foil. Find a dolphin picture with a clean outline either online or in a book. Print and cut out the shape on stiff paper or cardstock. Create your custom mold by stacking two long pieces of aluminum foil on top of each other and fold over three times to yield stiff strips that are eight layers thick. Gently tape your dolphin pattern to the bottom of a large cake pan and bend the foil strips to match the outline. Remove the dolphin pattern and grease and flour the inside of the cake pan. Pour in your cake batter inside and outside of the dolphin pattern and back as normal. After baking, carefully remove the dolphin shape from inside the aluminum foil pattern, just as you would remove a cookie from a cookie cutout.
  
  

Add Colors

• Make your dolphin fun and colorful with white, blue and green food coloring added to a simple white frosting like premade vanilla frosting or homemade frosting from 1 part shortening to 4 parts confectioner's sugar. You can also create a more anatomically accurate dolphin with a silver-gray coloring that matches real dolphins' skin by adding a very small amount of black food coloring to white frosting. You can amplify the silvery effect by adding edible silver powder, available from some specialty food stores.
  
  

Krispie Treats for the Body

• You can give the body of your dolphin cake needed bulk and shape it easily by using krispie treats that are still warm. Melt 3 tbsps. of butter with 10 oz. of marshmallows and stir until melted, then add 6 cups of puffed rice cereal and stir. You'll have a material that can easily be molded into a dolphin form that will hold its shape after cooling, which takes approximately 10 minutes.
  
  

Waves and Fish Friends

• Put your dolphin in an appropriate aquatic setting by using green and blue fruit roll-ups to create an ocean background. You can unroll the fruit roll-ups flat against a pan or cookie sheet and add additional roll-up cut outs to create seaweed. You can also bunch up the fruit roll-ups to create a rippled wave-like effect. Use Swedish fish and other candies to add ocean creatures to your dolphin cake design.