Recipe: Duck Cake by Gelato Messina’s Tom Mitchell

This story appears in our July 2025 Nostalgia issue, presented by Up, where we asked 13 professional bakers to recreate cakes from the iconic The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book.

For the duck cake, there wasn’t much room to stray from the original, so I followed the Women’s Weekly method right up to the decorating. I used a passionfruit Italian meringue to ice the cake, giving it some nice feather-like peaks.

Passionfruit Italian meringue

Ingredients

250g egg whites
450g caster sugar
150ml water
10g passionfruit powder
5g lemon yellow liquid food colouring

Method

Place egg whites into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk.

In a small saucepan, combine sugar and water, then bring the syrup up to 118°C.

Slowly pour the syrup over the egg whites while whisking.

Continue whisking until the meringue has cooled.

Add passionfruit powder and food colouring, and whisk until combined.

To decorate, use a palette knife to fully ice the duck cake in meringue. Once covered, use your hands to gently blob on extra meringue and pull away at an angle to form peaks – these should resemble feathers. Here’s a video showing how we do it at Messina for our bombe alaskas.

Once feathers are in place, complete duck decor with Smarties and liquorice. And, of course, crinkle-cut chips for the mouth.

The duck cake recipe first appeared in the The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, published in 1980.