Friday, April 22, 2011

Angry Birds Cake for Dave's 21st: An Adventure with Steph

My good friend/past room mate/future room mate/birthday twin, Steph, asked me for help making a cake for her boyfriend's 21st birthday. She requested an Angry Birds cake. For those who don't know, these are the characters to which she was referring:


This is a video game which you can download and play on your iphone or android. Steph wanted to make the red bird in the center of that image and was wondering if it was feasible. I chuckled to myself a little. Of course, Steph, anything is possible! This is the first time since some of the first few cakes that I had help making a cake! Steph now knows all my tricks and secrets, but I've sworn her to secrecy! We're living together in a little over a month, so I'd eventually have to let her in on the secrets anyway. :)

Knowing we'd have some extra cake batter, we planned to try out Bakerella's famous Cake Pops. We planned to make the green pig seen flying in the upper right hand corner of the image above.

I sent Steph out to Wegmans to get cake mix and a couple of ingredients for icing. We then met at Jo-Ann's and picked up some food coloring, sticks, candy melts and a piece of foam to hold the pops up.

Apparently, Dave (Steph's boyfriend), likes double chocolate cake, so when picking out the box cake mix, she picked out the fudgiest looking one she could find. Turns out she went a little too far down the aisle and picked up brownie mix! Ohh, Steph. We had a good chuckle at her expense (hehe) and then decided brownies were more yummy than cake anyway!

Ohh Steph. What will I do with you?

To make the red bird, we used the same method as I used on Justin's Boobie cake and baked the (brownie) batter in a pyrex bowl. We baked the rest of the batter in a round pan.

The brownies in the round pan were for the pigs. For those who are unfamiliar with the cake pop/ball process, I'll give you a quick run-down. You take your baked cake, crumble it up, add icing, mix it all up, form balls, and dip them in candy coating. They are really quite delicious!

We formed the cake/brownie balls and stuck them in the freezer so they would hold their shape. We had some trouble putting the sticks in the balls without them splitting, so we made most of them into cake balls instead of pops.

Brownie balls in the freezer
Melting the Candy Melts for coating the brownie balls

What a mess!

Making the pops and balls

Creepy-eyed green buggers
Steph adding details to the pigs

Bird brownie pre-icing

First layer of icing plus the beak

The beginnings of the eyes
Finished Angry Bird brownie cake!
Finished brownie balls
Oh for crying out loud, look at these little delicious buggers!
Finished pig pops
The birthday boy! (Don't mind the chalk all over him. He was at work all day and we surprised him!)
Cute, right? And delicious!
Steph and Dave!
Happy birthday, Dave!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Justin Dressler's 22nd

Looks like we're coming back into cake season!

For Justin's birthday last year, I tried to make him a cake to go with the theme of his party - highlighter. This year, I wanted to do something a little more personal. From the start, I knew I wanted to incorporate Frank's Red Hot Sauce because Justin is the type of guy who will (and does) put it on everything. I found a recipe on Frank's website for brownies. I was so curious (and had a craving for chocolate) that I made these ahead of time. Turns out, they are good! Chocolate and Frank's go together!

After MUCH discussion with mutual friends, I finally came up with a cake idea. Justin is a bit of a Lord of the Rings fan, so I went with that theme. I made the Witch King of Angmar, leader of the Nazgul.

Witch King



For those who are curious, I used two boxes of Dark Chocolate cake mix and prepared them as usual, except I added about 2/3-1 cup of Frank's total. 

Frank's!
Construction of this cake was fairly basic. I used two round cakes, stacked them, and carved a bit of an oval out of them for the face. Then I used my 9x11 pan for the tall spike at the top of the head. 

Step 1: Layer cake
Beginning to carve and construct
Large spike added
Facial details

First layer of icing
Side view
I made the rest of the spikes using candy melts. I just piped the melted candy onto parchment paper into the shape of spikes. My black food coloring did some interesting things.. It made the candy melts nearly purple, the cake greenish, and everyone's teeth and tongues purple and grey.  

Candy melts
Piped out into spikes
Spikes attached, final product
  
I ended up having a bit of cake left over from the 9x11 pan, so I used the leftover icing to write a little Elvish message.

"Happy birthday Justin"

"You fool. No man can kill me. Die now."
"I am no man."
Me, the Witch King and the birthday boy!

Thursday, April 7, 2011

New inspirations

I jumped on the bandwagon finally and made a tumblr. Actually, I had made it a long time ago but had never updated it. I'm going to be putting up my inspirations as I find them. It may be craft-related or cake-related or just something I like.

Just thought I'd put it on here for the record.

Meg's Inspirations

Happy creating!