Here is the Cake.  I decided that I would go relatively simple — a fondant covered floating island… with Candy Clay Chompies.

My son, he who inspired the Clone Trooper Cupcakes, Dragon Cake, and Perry the Platypus Cake, is obsessed with Angry Birds.  Well, he’s really obsessed with about a dozen games on the iPhone or Android when we’ll let him play them — and he got to play a lot while we were on vacation in Mexico.  And we had a 4 hour delay so I played my share of Angry Birds, too.  Anyway.  So here they are in cupcake form (here are a bunch of other Angry Birds creations, too).  Lots of fun to make, and quite tasty, too!

Wanna make them yourself?  They really aren’t that hard.  But I will warn you, they are definitely time consuming!

OH YEAH! Please go vote for these in the instructables cupcake contest!

More photos on Flickr

Basically, on top of your standard iced cupcakes, you place a bird.  The birds (and pigs) are made out of donut holes covered in marshmallow fondant, (the smaller birds are wrapped up mints or whoppers or similar).  It’s like playing with playdoh, and my 6 year old actually helped me make one of the set of 3 little birds (those are easier to make because with a hard center, you don’t have to be as careful while wrapping them).  Really, this is not that hard to do, it does take a little time and patience though, especially to kneed all those different colors into your fondant!

I wrote up an Instructable with everything step by step, and you can download it here: PDF: How to Make Angry Birds Cupcakes

My 5 year old has discovered the world of iPhone games, and loves Angry Birds.  So in honor of him, here’s a roundup of some fun Angry Bird things you can eat, play with, or make!

EAT THESE:

Twitter bud @robynski shares the how-to on making Angry Birds cookies on her blog

Angry Birds Cupcakes at Confessions of a Cookbook Queen

Angry Birds Cake! via Great White Snark … plus you can buy Edible Angry Birds cake toppers.

And a Playable Angry Birds Cake… Really!  via Craftzine

Also found at Craft, Make Angry Birds Bagel Sandwiches!

Bento Box Angry Birds by My Mealbox! (via neatorama)

MAKE THESE:

Needle felted adorable Angry Birds tutorial at Craft

How to make an Angry Birds magnet game at Geek Crafts

At Superpunch – Papercraft Angry Birds – download them here.

Angry Bird Plushies at My Paper Crane

Having an Angry Birds themed party?  Here’s how to make your own balloons!

and..{Free Printables} Angry Birds Party Printables

Angry Birds in Lego at Craftzine

Just for fun…

Real Life Angry Birds video

Another view

via the always awesome Great White Snark

Speaking of octopuses… I got stalled on my update to the hexapus tutorial, but I’ll get it out this week, I hope!

Janelle says:

“Finally!!!! Thanks to the “Dabbled” instructions on the Perry the Platypus cake I gathered the courage to do my first fondant cake. Due to a broken ankle I put it off a couple of weeks but the party is now over and nary a Perry is to be found. The kids loved them. I made mini Perrys using twinkies as the cake base. Thanks so much for your help, Dabbled :P”

I totally love this! She simplified the more complex original instructions, and achieved a herd of adorable Perrys! This is a great idea for those who want to create the look, but in a less complicated way. These would also be great sitting on top of a store bought sheet cake for a custom look. Thanks for sharing these with us, Janelle!

And if you’re thinking of throwing a Phineas and Ferb party, along with your Perry cake, you might like some of the other party food:  Phineas & Ferb / Star Wars the Clone Wars Party Food!

NOTE:  People keep asking for the instructions – Janelle used MY ORIGINAL INSTRUCTIONS, but modified them for the smaller twinkie size.

Ready to make your Perry Cake?  Really, you CAN do this!

Yesterday we covered all The Prep Work required to make your platypus cake. Now it’s a day or so before you need the cake, and we’re going to put it all together.

You should have:

• 1 frosted flat cake.
• 1 unfrosted loaf cake
• extra cake (cupcakes)
• 1 batch marshmallow fondant
• the rest of your cream cheese icing
• The Supplies from yesterday’s list.

Clear yourself off a good work area, get your fondant out of the fridge, and let’s get to assembly!

1. The Base

You have your sheet cake, iced with your cream cheese icing.  You really don’t HAVE to do anything else, but I’ve found that working on the platypus tends to mess up your icing, so I added jelly beans to hide my sins, and also for additional color.  Any addons to the base can either be done prior to body placement (Step 4) or after.  I did mine after, but if i was doing this over, I would probably have done it immediately before the body placement, after Step 3.

Some ideas

• If you have plenty of extra fondant, use a flower cookie cutter to cut out fondant flowers.  Place them overlapping all around the cake (skipping the very middle that will be covered with a platypus, of course.  (In retrospect, I would have done this.  Fondant circles in various colors and sizes would also have been very cool.
• Cover the entire top with lime green tinted coconut, to simulate grass
• What I actually did:  Cover the ground around Perry with multicolored jelly belly candies (I was thinking they could be platypus eggs!)
• If you have enough extra, roll out a large sheet of colored fondant (any color but yellow or green) and cover the entire top of the cake with it, for an extra smooth look.

2. Molding the bill and the feet:

Marshmallow fondant doesn’t hold shapes as well as regular fondant, so last year when I did the dragon cake, i decided to use something a little stronger as a ‘skeleton’–molded tootsie rolls.  These can also be done ahead of time.  They also will not be seen on the final cake, but should be a light enough color that they don’t show through the yellow fondant that will cover them.

Get out your tootsie rolls.  Break one large roll into several smaller pieces, and microwave for JUST A FEW SECONDS to soften.  You can now knead this in your hands until it’s soft and moldable like playdough.

You’ll be making 2 foot shapes, a top bill shape, and a bottom bill shape.

The foot shape is simple.  Just make a flat 1/2 in thick triangle shape.  Then squeeze it with your fingers toward 1 point to elongate.  Then use your fingers to make ‘toes’ on the opposite flat end.  That’s hard to explain in words, but just look at the picture!

The bottom bill is simply a half circle shape (like a “D”), and the top bill is a larger half circle, with the flat side thicker, coming to a triangular point.  See diagram.  (I don’t have any shots of the bill uncovered, but you can see the shapes in the photos of covering the bill, later on in this tutorial)

Use your loaf cake to help judge the size to make these.  Remember, you’ll be covering them with fondant, so they’ll be bigger later, so make them a little smaller than needed in the final cake.  Set these aside.

3. Fondant:

First, you’ll need an idea of how much to color for each part–this can be trial and error the first time, so here’s a trick.  I’d suggest breaking off a workable size ball of white, and rolling it out to about 1/8 in thick.  You’ll need to knead it a little first to get it workable after the night in the fridge.  See how big it is.  Take your loaf pan (that you used to bake the body!) and use it as a model.  Hold your pan in the air, bottom side up.  Gently drape your test fondant over it, and see how big a sheet you’re going to need.  This is also good practice for how to work with the fondant, before you try it on the real thing!  I found Peggy Weaver’s tutorial on working with the fondant very helpful – go read it!

Once you have an idea how much fondant is needed for your body, make a ball that size, and set aside.  Make another ball that size and set aside for the tail.  Then make 2 smaller balls : 1 for the bill/feet, 1 for the legs.  Finally, you’ll 2 even smaller balls (like a large marble) which will be the black eyeballs and hair, and the white eyeballs.  And you should still have a good bit of left over white–which is good, because if you screw up, you may need it!

• Green:  Take one large ball, and one medium ball and knead together with green (and maybe a touch of blue) foodcoloring, until you get the desired Perry body color.
• Yellow:  Take one Medium ball, and knead together with yellow food coloring, with a few drops of red, until you get the desired yellow-gold color for Perry’s bill.
• Black:  Knead one small ball with black food coloring, for Perry’s hair and irises.  (You may not even need that much, so start small)
• White:  leave white, duh! for the eyes.
• Brown (or Chocolate):  If you have brown food coloring, you can use that.  I didn’t, so I kneaded in melted dark chocolate.  This changes the consistency of the fondant, so if you’re doing that, wait until we get to that step, below!

4. Perry’s Body

Roll out enough of your green fondant to cover the loaf cake (remember, we figured out how much we needed in the prior step!  Save some of the green for the legs.)

The body of Perry is basically just the loaf shaped cake, turned upside down. Round off his body by carving off the  4 top edges with a sharp knife.  Also round off the corners.  Place the cake on top of your upside down loaf pan, to use as a pedestal while decorating.

Cover the top and sides of the cake with a thin layer of icing.  Neatness doesn’t count here, you’re just providing glue and padding for the fondant.

Now, the fun part.  Carefully center the fondant over the cake, like we practiced, and drape over the cake and the loaf pan.  The fondant does stretch, so if you’ve screwed up and your not quite reaching the bottom somewhere, don’t fret.  let gravity do it’s work.  Let sit for several minutes for the fondant to stretch.  (Again, this tutorial is helpful.)

Smooth and stretch the fondant as necessary, trim off excess, leaving about 1 inch or so, which you can then tuck under the bottom of the loaf. A Perfectly Packaged Perry body!

You can now place him on his base.  Remember, you still have to add the bill to the front, so don’t center the body on the cake, leave several inches to add his bill.  The tail drapes off the cake, so no need to leave much room for that.

Covering & Placing the Bill and Feet

Roll out your yellow fondant, and wrap pieces around each of the feet, and the top and bottom bill.  Since the mouth is mostly closed, you don’t have to wrap the whole bill.  For the top bill, just turn the rounded end up a bit to achieve a slightly open mouth. You can go ahead and place the bill on the cake. See photos:

5. Make the Eyes and Hair:

In his platypus state (as opposed to Agent P) Perry eyes a little goofy, with no lids, and look in slightly different directions.

Use a little of your extra cake (the leftover cupcakes) to make a cake ball mixture.  Combine crumbled cake with leftover icing and mix with your fingers until the cake sticks together in a ball.  Make a ball the size of a large marble, and cover with white fondant.  Now make another!  (Note: if you don’t want to do cake balls, you can just use a ball of extra fondant in place of the cake)

Then take a little ball of black, and press flat.  Dampen one side, and press on to your white eyeball.

They are a little to round now, so use a knife to slice off the back 1/3 of the eyeball, so you have a flat side to stick to the cake.  You may want to embed a toothpick in the cake, and slide the eyeball on to that to make sure it stays put.

(I placed mine a little high on his head, I think, so you may want to place a little lower on the front of the face.)

6. The Legs

The legs are similar to the eyes.  Use your cake ball mixture to make the basic shape, then wrap in fondant.  Hide your fondant seam by putting it against the cake body.  Moisten with water or extra icing to stick to cake.  Note, I did his back legs too far forward, the thigh should have been closer to the rear of the platypus.  Place your yellow feet in the appropriate place, as shown.

….

7. The Tail

I didn’t have any good foodcoloring for the brown for Perry’s tail, so I figured why not mix it with some chocolate!  I melted a bar of Hershey’s Special Dark and kneaded it into the fondant the same as you would with food coloring, until I reach a good brown.  This worked, but it also caused the fondant to lose pliability, so it’s a little harder to work with.  Roll out a large piece of your chocolate fondant (either double the normal thickness, or stack two sheets).  cut out your tail shape, then use a chopstick to press a diamond quilted pattern into the tail.  I waited to attach the tail (since it falls off the cake) until i set up the cake for the party.  Just adhere the end to your platy-posterior with some leftover icing (see above photo in the legs section)!

Your Completed Cake

You’re ready to go now… store the cake in some sort of box, not in the refrigerator, but protected from ants and other lovelies.  Place in a cool room out of reach of children and pets.  The fondant will soften overnight, so be much more careful touching it the next day.  And even if it doesn’t come out perfectly (mine had a few flaws!) your Phineas and Ferb loving child with think you are the greatest!

(See all Phineas & Ferb Meet the Clone Wars Party Posts!)

I have a request for the tutorial to make the Perry the Platypus Cake, and since it’s needed in a hurry, I’m doing this tutorial in two parts.  By the way, I did a really detailed tutorial on last year’s dragon cake, and this year’s cake is actually similar, if a little simpler. So it wouldn’t be a bad idea to read through that tutorial in case I miss anything I covered there, as far as techniques.

More pics of the cake and the party here!

We’ll start with the prep work: assembling your hardware, getting the shopping done, and making ahead the components!

Hardware:

• 8.5″x4.5″ loaf pan
• second loaf pan or cupcake pan
• 9×12″ rectangular pan
• Rolling Pin
• Parchment paper (optional, but helpful)
• Large piece of cardboard, covered in foil, freezer paper or other paper, for cake board. ~24″x18″

Shopping List:

• 1 16 oz bag Marshmallows
• 2 lb powdered sugar
• Crisco
• Corn starch
• 1 8oz pkg cream cheese or Neufchâtel cheese
• vanilla
• 1 stick butter
• Pound Cake Ingredients
• Ingredients for base case (1-2 boxes cake mix or your favorite recipe)
• Food coloring (I used this one for the black and the green: Wilton Garden Candy Color Set, and some cheap yellow and red gel coloring.)
• Brown food coloring, or 1 bar dark chocolate.
• Vanilla or other light colored tootsie rolls (our local Dollar Tree had a two pack of the large sticks, which was more than enough)
• Wooden skewers (short ones are fine)
• Candy for base cake decoration (I used jelly bellies, but anything would work.  Green candies or green coconut would make a nice ‘grass’ effect)

Make ahead:

Set out your butter and cream cheese to soften.

Bake your first cake (ours was chocolate!) to serve as the ground that Perry lays on.  I used a box mix for this, and i think 1 box in a 13×9 pan was a maybe a little skimpy.  So you might want to consider making up 2 batches, and using 1.5 for the cake, and doing the rest as cupcakes.  Let cool thoroughly.

Bake your second cake, in a loaf pan, 3/4 filled. (here’s the recipe – with this recipe you’ll have enough for the loaf pan, plus some extra cupcakes) You want it as tall as possible, so err on the side of overfilling (Place a sheet pan under the loaf pan to catch any spillage). Bake the remainder of your second cake batter as cupcakes, or in your second loaf pan.  You’ll need some extra cake later, so save the extras, don’t eat them yet!
I like to use a sling of parchment paper as a liner to ensure ease of removal from the pans.  Just cut a sheet of parchment paper as wide as your pan is long, but long enough so that if set inside the pan, it hangs over both sides.  Spray the pan with non-stick spray, and  press the parchment.  If necessary, secure the sides with binder clips to keep the parchment in place and pressed against the sides of the pan.

Allow cakes to cool thoroughly.

You can go ahead and make up your batch of icing.  I like Cream Cheese Icing — here’s a quick recipe:  Cream together in mixer : 8 oz cream cheese, 1 stick butter (both softened).  Add 1 teas vanilla.  Slowly add 1 lb powdered (icing) sugar.  Beat until smooth.

Place your base cake on the cake board,  and frost the base cake.  Reserve at least 1/3 of the icing for later use.

Make up your batch of Marshmallow fondant and place in the refrigerator, wrapped tightly according to the directions.  Don’t color it yet.

You’re all prepped and ready to go!

Next we’ll assemble and decorate your Perry cake… go here!

Go read the Interview: Debbie Does Cakes

More CAKE! on Dabbled..

For my birthday I decided to be crazy-go-nuts on my own birthday cake and really push my boundaries as a novice baker. I figured since the only one to disappoint is myself, no harm in trying something that can fail horribly, right? And ya know what, I didn’t do too bad.

I didn’t use any fondant, since I hate the stuff. It’s almond cake and rice krispie treats with modeling chocolate for the cake and gumpaste for the Daleks. Did you know modeling chocolate is remarkably easy to make? I did learn that you can’t paint it like fondant. It acts like a waxed car. But it tastes DELICIOUS. I mean, who wouldn’t love cake covered in chocolate?? So yup, besides the wooden dowels, it was 100% edible! I’m quite proud of that.

Go read the whole thing!

How to make Cake Eggs:

All you need:
Egg shells (Jumbo would yield larger results, but in this case, I thought brown would be pretty.)
Your favorite light in texture cake batter (for these I just used a white cake mix)

Using an icepick or other sharp pointy object, make a hole in the top of each egg shell. Carefully! Then enlarge the hole to about a 1/2 inch in diameter by carefully removing little bits of shell.
Pour out the insides and reserve for your cake batter, and/or other uses. (If you need to separate eggs for your cake batter, like I did, just pour out the whites first into one bowl, then use a toothpick to break up the yolk, and pour it into a separate bowl. Otherwise, just use a toothpick to mix the egg up a bit in the shell, then pour out.

Wash your egg shells.
Looking for more info, I googled and found these instructions, which suggest the egg shells should then be soaked in salty water for 30 minutes. I have no idea if this is necessary, but I decided to try that. That recipe also suggested drizzling a little oil in the shells, but I found that problematic. Since I’m serving these in their shells, I’d just skip that, or try a squirt of non stick spray.

After your eggshells are dry, it’s time to fill and bake them!
A mini muffin tin was the perfect size to hold the eggs upright for filling and baking. If your eggs don’t fit perfectly, you might add salt or sand to the cups to provide stability, or place a little foil in the cups to fill in the space.

Put your cake batter in a piping bag or a plastic baggie with a corner cut off, and pipe batter into egg shells, filling about 2/3 of the way up.

If you’ve overfilled your eggs, you will have batter that comes out the top. So put a sheet pan under your muffin tin to catch any extra that might drip off.

Bake according to the cake directions (temperature) for about 20 minutes (use cupcake directions as a guide, though these will be smaller so may not take as long.) Use the toothpick test to determine doneness.

If your eggs have overflowed, just knock off the excess. Let cool. If you place your eggs in an air tight container or zip bag, any cake on the outside of the eggs will easily wipe off after resting.

Egg cups make the perfect serving dish. Or, serve a set in a clean egg carton! If you want to add a dollop of icing or whipped cream, peel a little of the shell off the top, and decorate as desired. You could also just top the egg with an edible flower, and let the cake be a bit of a surprise!

You could also fancy these up by painting the shells with a little food coloring or similar, after baking!

(thanks to Grieg for helping me with the photos!)