2D 1st place 1
Imposter In The Bird Hotel
by Alex Waite @Alexw · submitted Aug 15, 2009 · 2009 contest
1 / 47
Description
Hi everyone,
This is the cake that taught me two important things, one, making 50+ mini bird cakes was a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be, and two, once the song "Birdhouse in your soul" gets stuck in your head it's pretty hard to get it out.
I really liked this design by Michelle Li and decided to incorporate my own twist by turning all the birds hotel rooms into mini cakes whilst also using larger cakes for the hotel roof and base so that there would be a choice of either bigger cake to cut into or individual treats. Getting these different styles of cake to fit together and look like they are all part of a single design took a bit of head scratching, and quite a lot of template making, before I could get started on the baking.
Once I had it all planned out as much as possible I baked two 9 inch square green tea flavour cakes, which were both halved and then topped with white chocolate butter cream. It was the first time I had tried this flavour of cake and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it combined with the white chocolate. I then divided one cake to become the mini cakes which were about 1.5 inch each and then carved the other cake into the pieces for the roof and base. All the cakes are covered with fondant and that is also what I used to make all the decorations. Details on the 20 x 25 inch board, and some parts of the hotel such as the newsprint on the paper being read by one of the birds, were hand painted with diluted food colour, and as you can hopefully see from the photos, all the birds etc. were modeled by hand. The bird symbol on top of the hotel roof is attached to a sugar stick made from gum paste which is also what I used to make the dividers that I placed horizontally between each row of mini cakes, so it's 100% edible.
Since I wanted all the birds to match the original design, and there was so much detail to incorporate, it took me about four days to complete the whole project. Hopefully some of this detail can be seen in the close up pictures I've uploaded. I ended up giving the cake to my friend for her to take into work tomorrow as she's just moved departments and she thought a little Monday morning cake bribery would be just the thing to get on the good side of her new co-workers. To help get them started I sampled a mini cake, picking the bird next to the 'impostor' cat to be eaten first as it seemed only right that it should be the first one to disappear.
This is the cake that taught me two important things, one, making 50+ mini bird cakes was a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be, and two, once the song "Birdhouse in your soul" gets stuck in your head it's pretty hard to get it out.
I really liked this design by Michelle Li and decided to incorporate my own twist by turning all the birds hotel rooms into mini cakes whilst also using larger cakes for the hotel roof and base so that there would be a choice of either bigger cake to cut into or individual treats. Getting these different styles of cake to fit together and look like they are all part of a single design took a bit of head scratching, and quite a lot of template making, before I could get started on the baking.
Once I had it all planned out as much as possible I baked two 9 inch square green tea flavour cakes, which were both halved and then topped with white chocolate butter cream. It was the first time I had tried this flavour of cake and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it combined with the white chocolate. I then divided one cake to become the mini cakes which were about 1.5 inch each and then carved the other cake into the pieces for the roof and base. All the cakes are covered with fondant and that is also what I used to make all the decorations. Details on the 20 x 25 inch board, and some parts of the hotel such as the newsprint on the paper being read by one of the birds, were hand painted with diluted food colour, and as you can hopefully see from the photos, all the birds etc. were modeled by hand. The bird symbol on top of the hotel roof is attached to a sugar stick made from gum paste which is also what I used to make the dividers that I placed horizontally between each row of mini cakes, so it's 100% edible.
Since I wanted all the birds to match the original design, and there was so much detail to incorporate, it took me about four days to complete the whole project. Hopefully some of this detail can be seen in the close up pictures I've uploaded. I ended up giving the cake to my friend for her to take into work tomorrow as she's just moved departments and she thought a little Monday morning cake bribery would be just the thing to get on the good side of her new co-workers. To help get them started I sampled a mini cake, picking the bird next to the 'impostor' cat to be eaten first as it seemed only right that it should be the first one to disappear.
