I love this website. I have used it to help me make several birthday cakes for my kids. I have built a train, airplane, and fire engine, but this year my son wanted an Angry Birds birthday cake for his 5th birthday. The cake itself wasn’t the challenging issue, it was designing cake top structures that I could transport to the park, where we had my son’s birthday party, and assemble them quickly on site. I don’t play Angry Birds so I had to review several scenes from the game and get my son’s input on what to build.
My goal was to have one single continuous cake with the birds on one end and the piggies on the other. My oven is not large enough for a standard sheet cake. So I had to make four 13 x 9 x 2 cakes and cut them to make them fit on a standard sheet cake board. My son loves chocolate so I put two 13 x 9 x 2 Betty Crocker Chocolate cakes lengthwise end to end on the bottom covered them with chocolate frosting and put two vanilla (with added mini chocolate chips) cake mixes lengthwise end to end on the top to make the cake long enough and tall enough to support the bird and piggy structures and dowels.
My son and I built practice structures to get a sense of scale, first using Legos and a sheet of paper the length of a sheet cake, then again using graham crackers, wafer cookies, and caramels. I wasn’t sure how much I could fit on one cake.
I wanted the cake to look like it would if you were looking directly at a scene from Angry Birds. So I frosted the sides with Betty Crocker chocolate frosting to make the soil and the top with a whipcreme butter cream frosting colored green to make the grass.
The structure design was quite an experiment. I wanted the structures to be edible. So I bought graham crackers and wafer cookies and dipped them in grey-tinted, white chocolate. The tank frame is primarily graham crackers dipped in and held together by white chocolate. The wheels are mini Oreos, held on by tooth picks which also supported the tank. I chocolate coated a lollipop stick for the gun. I used caramels and chocolate covered wafer cookies for supports and caramels for the TNT boxes. The long posts in the two towers are wafer cookies with lollipop sticks in them to act as cake dowels.
I haven’t worked with fondant before. The one fondant structure I made, the sling shot, came out great but fell apart when I tried to attach the sling. Luckily I had a toy angry birds sling shot to replace it at the last minute. I ordered the birds and piggies, which are not edible, on-line. My son thought they were great and he was so excited to help put them on the cake. His friends got to take some home and we still have a few as toys.
The mounds for the birds and piggies were made of cut up pieces of chocolate cake, covered with chocolate frosting and chocolate sprinkles. I used cake dowels to hold them in place. I bought some candy rocks and decorative trees to complete my “scene”.
It was quite a hit with the kids, in fact, one mom recently told me her kids are still talking about it as the coolest birthday cake ever.
It looks like a lot of work