One of my friends loves Angry Birds, so I thought it would be perfect to make her an Angry Birds cake using fondant, her favorite vanilla cake recipe, and a little bit of creativity. Before I begin, though, I have a little confession: I have never played Angry Birds. I’m not exactly sure why not. It’s definitely not some sort of cultural protest or anything so profound. I just haven’t. Don’t judge.
Anyways, down to business. Begin by baking your favorite cake recipe in 8″ pans. I happened to know the birthday girl is a “Funfetti” fan so I made my favorite vanilla cake recipe and added about 2 tablespoons worth of sprinkles into the batter before baking. When the cake is cooled, cut off the rounded tops of the cakes so they’re nice and flat for stacking and decorating.
Note: When making a cake with fondant, I like to put a generous amount of homemade frosting in-between the layers.
Next, crumb-coat the cake with a very thin layer of frosting. The goal is to use enough that it will hold the fondant, but not so much that the fondant will look bumpy with globs of frosting underneath. It’s a fine line.
Now for the fondant. To be completely honest, I don’t find homemade fondant is remarkably better than store-bought, but it’s totally your call. Color the fondant to your liking by kneading gel food dye into the dough on a corn-starched surface. Then roll it out to 1/4 of an inch thick and smooth it over your cake.
Hooray! This takes practice, but your cake will look super professional once you master it!
Ok. Next, I decided to make the red bird for the cake topper. (From my research on the Interwebs, he seemed popular.) Begin by making a ball out of Rice Krispie treats. (I used store-bought because making a whole batch for one little bird s0o did not seem worth it to me, but if you do, more power to you!)
When you have a nice round(ish) shape, (this will take a good amount of pressing and molding to ensure there are no bumps) coat the cake topper with a thin layer of frosting before covering it in red fondant.
All you need now are his little, angry bird-y details! (The pictures below show the stages of the bird with the details added to the right.)
Use a bit of black piping gel for his pupils and voila! Your perfect Angry Birds cake topper is all done and precious!
In terms of decorating the rest of the cake, it’s totally up to you. Admittedly, I went a bit overboard and made all of the Angry Birds characters in 2-D for the sides of the cake. The how-to for those guys would make this post incredibly long, but if I get requests for demonstrations, I’d be happy to post them!
Here are a few of my favorites:
Pretty cute, if I do say so myself!
Here’s the final product:
(I’m kicking myself that I didn’t write, “Happy BIRD-thday!” *sigh* )
As you can see, I also did some background details. What you do is totally up to you and your creativity! It might be cute to do a scene from the game! Post your cakes to share what you came up with for your very own Angry Birds cake!
