Homemade Beauties By Heidi: Day #8 Bird-Day Week Continued: Angry Bird Cake & Cupcakes

I am going to make a confession. I love to plan parties. If you know me, that is not a surprise. There is probably no hobby I love more than to plan parties. However...here's the big confession...I have always preferred someone else to do the baking. I could style a party like nobody's business, but give me a cake that someone else made and I was just fine.

That was until I met a dear, sweet friend of mine who is an excellent baker. She has challenged me in ways she may never know. She has shown me that cakes and cupcakes from home taste worlds better than store bought ones. And, dare I say it? Baking is fun.

So for my little guys Angry Bird birthday I decided to make a Red Angry Bird cake. I have never decorated a cake with decorating tips and all that stuff. I have them. I've had good intentions, but I have never really done the cake. It didn't help that I started the cake the morning of the party. Yep, you read that correctly. I had never decorated a cake and I decided to leave it until the morning of the party to get started! I am a genius.

I'm not completely crazy. My mom was here and she has decorated many cakes, so I figured she would have it all under control. If I messed up, she would take over. She figured I knew what I was doing and she didn't need to worry. That is until party day when it might have slipped out that I had NO CLUE what I was doing! Oops.

I had another reason to be calm...not just the secret weapon of my Mom. I had ordered amazing fondant pieces from Charynn at Two Sugar Babies. I had seen her work online for another Angry Bird Party and I knew she would do an excellent job. I figured if all else failed...if I ruined the cake...I would still be able to have cupcakes with her adorable work on them...so I was set.

This is what I used to get started on my Angry Bird:

I followed the directions very carefully, but this cake was not like a regular cake. It was a challenge, and it seemed like nothing was going to work correctly.

See how the layers were falling apart? Aaaah!

A bit of icing to "glue" the guy together and we were set. My mom jumped in and frosted the bird with the crumb coat. Honestly, it was because she was panicking at this point due to my lack of skills. I copied the face for the bird from an image online and used it to mark out where things would be placed. My mom covered the bird in red and left the face for me. It was a bit of trial and error, but I am now quite confident that I could do the whole thing on my own next time.

The face was almost like painting. I just needed to fill things in where they should be. I really enjoyed using the star tip.

I did not enjoy the straight line tip...although that may have been due to the super thick consistency from the black store bought frosting. It was nearly impossible to squeeze!

I didn't like the way the black lines seemed to sit on top of the birds features, so I went over the area again with another layer. It looked much nicer the second time!