Baking adventures of a ten year old: Angry birds cake

It's my cousins birthday so I decided to make him a cake for his party. We had to travel to get to the party, so we made the cake and the fondant the day before, and brought everything with us to decorate the cake when we got up north. We ended up using a boxed chocolate cake mix to save time. We actually used one and a half boxes of chocolate cake mix and a 9x13 cake pan. Because we made the cake the night before, we let it cool right in the pan that we brought up north. This was apparently a bad idea because it refused to release from the pan. After a lot of pounding and scraping, the cake came out. You can't see it but this cake is in three pieces and is held together by butter cream frosting. No one knew except for us. We melted the chocolate frosting a little to make it easier to spread.

The fondant recipe we used was pretty simple. We actually made one recipe from scratch and bought another batch of it from the craft store because we thought we needed more for our cake pops we were attempting. The one batch we made would have been enough for the cake. We decided we liked the homemade stuff better.

We used one 16oz bag of mini marshmallows, 4 Tbsp water, 2 lbs of powdered sugar and a lot of shortening to keep things greased. We also used our stand mixer which made it really easy, but you could knead this by hand if necessary.

Be sure to grease the dough hook and bowl of the stand mixer really well. Add 2/3 of the powdered sugar to the bowl. In a microwave safe bowl, melt the marshmallows with the water on high for about one minue or until the marshmallows are melted. Add the marshmallows to the powdered sugar and mix on low speed for 2-3 minutes. If sticky, add more powdered sugar and continue to mix. Fondant should be pliable and firm, not dry and crumbly or super sticky. If kneading by hand, be sure to grease the counter tops and your hands very well and knead until firm. Turn fondant onto clean work surface and knead by hand until excess powdered sugar is absorbed. This is when we added our colors. Be sure to use gel food coloring because regular food coloring will change the consistency of the fondant. We used red, blue, yellow, black, orange, brown, and grey. Feel free to play with the colors to get ones you like. Wrap the fondant in cling wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes before using. We found that after using it for awhile, it would start to get get sticky, so we put it in the fridge for a while to let it firm back up.

We rolled out the green fondant to just cover the cake. We ended up buying a fondant roller from the craft store which worked really well. Make sure to grease it. We were going to buy a fondant wheel cutter thing (like a mini pizza cutter) but decided to just buy an exacto knife instead because it was cheaper. It worked, but the fondant sort of got stuck around the blade. The wheel cutter could be useful if your going to try working with fondant again. We cut a scalloped edge using the exacto knife. Be careful to not roll the fondant too thin or it will be hard to get onto the cake. We actually rolled and cut the fondant on a flexible cutting board mat which made it really easy. We just picked up the mat and flipped the fondant onto the cake. It could get tricky if you tried to pick it up I think.

This is what it looked like after covering it.

We made the rice crispy treats according to the recipe on the box before we started frosting the cake. This way they had time to cool beore we needed to mold them into shapes. we made a slingshot and four balls for the birds and then four different sized balls for the pigs. We also made a box shape for tnt and then a few shapes for boulders. The rice crispies are really easy to shape and work with. Be careful not to make the slingshot too big because it gets heavy on the cake and ours started to tip over.

This is the platform that the pigs sat on. We covered it in brown fondant and placed it in one corner of the cake.

We wrapped all the rice crispy pieces in the different colored fondant and then added details with fondant as well. The fondant pretty much sticks to itself, so it wasn't too hard, just tedious.

Here is the finished cake

We used frosting pens to write the birthday message.

We tried making angry bird cake pops but that was an epic fail. We tried to wrap the fondant around the cake pops, but then had to somehow roll it to make it look smooth. This caused the cake to disintegrate and start to fall apart. It was super frustrating. Especially because there are apparently a million people online that have made angry bird cake pops look awesome with fondant. These people must be superhuman, because we almost threw them out the window. The cake pops caused some tension among all of us. Once we finally got the few cake pops that we decided to decorate look normal, we put them on the sticks. The fondant made them so heavy though, that the sticks went right through the top of their heads and the cake slid to the bottom. That made it super annoying. We took the cake off the sticks, and then set the cake pops on the sides of the cake. They looked pretty good in the end, but we would not recommend attempting the cake pops. Save your sanity and stick to the cake. We finally ended up taking the rest of the cake pops and dipping them in buttercream frosting and adding sprinkles. The kids loved them. Way easier.

To go with the angry birds theme, we also made a full size sling shot out of 2x4s. We attached it to some big pieces of wood at my uncles house, and then attached a water balloon launcher. We brought a bunch of cardboard boxes and my stepmom painted a bunch of pigs onto the boxes. The kids were lined up to shoot dodge balls at the cardboard box wall. It was a pretty big hit. There were 30 kids at this birthday party so it was kind of crazy for awhile.