Birds of a Feather - Part I

A few weeks ago I was offered the chance to make a SUPER COOL cake!! Some friends of our grew their family from 1 daughter who was 3 years old - to - 5 daughters who are all under the age of 4 (two 4 year olds - one 2 year old - two 1 year olds) all in less then a year.....but it has been about 2 years that they have all been together. The occassion they were celebrating? The finalization of the adoption for two of their daughters. Two are bio theirs and the final daughter is the sibling to the two becoming legally theirs. So it really was a wonderfully special occassion!!

The mom of this brood asked me if I ever do cakes for others.......do I ever do cakes for others?? Only when they ask!! And so it was that our family got to gift their family a tremendously important cake.

What to do - how to do it - what could be special enough to convey the day? The family asked for VERY BRIGHT girlie colors. After that I was told "do whatever you want" - but there was a hint that a tiered cake would be fun.

So my first picture is the stacking.....how big and how much........


The bowl on the top was for me to figure out how big to make my "special element". Since I was given full creative license I thought it would be fun to make a birds nest and have the ENTIRE family represented in a nest together at the top of the cake. So I needed to make a nest.

Making the nest I began by lining a bowl (as seen on top of the stack) with plastic.

Next I took some white melting chocolates and well.......melted them.........this time in the microwaved.


After they were melted I stirred them up until they were smooth. Then I took another step not shown and added a small bit of brown dye in the chocolate to make it more resemble the color of a birds nest.

Put all the chocolate into an icing bag with a medium sized tip and began to put the chocolate into the bowl - going back and forth making a random pattern - to of course look similar to a nest.

Once this was done I let it sit and harden. Tah Dah...........I don't have a final picture of the nest until later in the cake. The nest on the cake though is a darker brown - in the end I felt like this mild brown color was not holding its own against the bold colors of the birds and we ate this one.

Still - it was fun working to figure this out. And even more fun to see how excited the kids were about the final product.