Angry Birds Party!

As you may remember from reading my dragon cake post, this year I ended up making two completely unrelated cakes for my oldest son's birthday party. The dragon one was to celebrate with his classmates at school, and this one to celebrate at home with a few friends. My son made me a drawing to let me know how he wanted his cake... here it is:

Crystal clear, right?? ;) Well, luckily it also came with an oral explanation: he wanted a castle cake with the evil pigs, and a pirate ship with pirate Angry Birds. His favorite cake has always been lemon pound cake with lemon curd filling and swiss meringue buttercream, but I figured not all children would like that so I convinced him to make the ship lemon and the castle chocolate instead. I baked, torted, filled, carved, and crumb coated both cakes, and chilled them for a few hours before decorating them.


Decoration was made almost entirely in modeling chocolate naturally tinted in red, gray, and yellow with vegetable dyes, or in natural brown depending on the case (same material as in the dragon cake). However, details in white, green, and blue I had to make in fondant tinted with conventional artificial dyes because of two reasons: "white" modeling chocolate is never really white, and both green and blue vegetable dyes are super unstable (mostly due to the blue component) and fade within a couple of hours of being mixed in the fondant or modeling chocolate (I ran some tests beforehand). So I had to work with what I had.

Once I was done decorating each cake, I placed them on a thick cake board and added "grass" (green fondant sprinkled with green coconut), and "waves" (fondant strips tinted in an ombré fashion from white to dark blue)

 

Since I can't have a party without cake pops, I made assorted pigs and birds as party favors :)

Enjoy!

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