Beautiful Blue Bird Cake Pop Tutorial

I adore these cute little birds which sold out quite fast at the Queens Park Handmade Markets last weekend. Thought I might share the process with you.

You will need:

• Crumbled cake
• Buttercream
• Melted White Chocolate coloured you favourite bird colour (I used ChefMaster Blue Candy Colour)
• White modelling chocolate
• Gel/Candy colours (I used ChefMaster Candy Colours -  Pink, Yellow and Blue)
• Small Black Sugar Pearls
• Heart or Blossom cutter
• Small Petal or Tear shaped cutter
• Petal Veiner or toothpick
• Paper Lolly sticks

Using a nice dense cake (I used chocolate mud with honeycomb crumble) and not too much buttercream, shape your small balls of cake (about 30g) into a tear drop shape bending the 'tail' up slightly. Chill then attach to your sticks with a little melted chocolate in the colour you will use for the body. Put aside to chill while you make your bits and pieces.

 To prepare the wings, beak and heart you will need white modelling chocolate. Never used it before? Visit www.craftsy.com and see some of their great tutorials or search www.youtube.com where you can find plenty of free videos. I plan to add some modelling chocolate tutorials to my blog at a later time so stay tuned.

Colour a small amount yellow (if you don't have the right candy colours you can use normal gel colours to tint the modelling chocolate, I would not recommend liquid colours as they make the chocolate too sticky), a small amount pink and a medium amount the same colour as your melted chocolate you have chosen for the body.

How much is a small amount? When I make 50 pops I use a piece the size of a ping pong ball for the beak and hearts - this will give you enough to play with. For the wings I use a tennis ball sized amount.

Rolling the chocolate is easiest done on a silicone matt. If you find it sticks use just the smallest amount of copha (Crisco in the US) on your hands and the mat.

For the beaks pinch off pea sized amounts of yellow and roll between your fingers to make a small cone. Put them aside to firm up as the temperature of your hands will make the chocolate soft.

Roll out the pink and use a small heart cutter (or a flower if you don't have a heart shape) to cut one for each bird.

Roll out the blue and use a small petal or tear drop shape - 2 for each bird. I then used a magnolia/lily petal veiner to get the feathered look. If you don't have access to a veiner you can use the tines of a small fork or a tooth pick dragged gently from the rounded end to the point to get a similar texture.

Then comes the fun part! Dip your bird in the melted chocolate and carefully shake off the excess. While the chocolate is soft add the beak and eyes to the rounded 'face' end.

Use a toothpick to pick up a small amount of melted chocolate and attach the wings to either side of the body. Place the wings rounded end forward and bend the pointed end of the wing out slightly away from the body

Use another small dot of chocolate to attach the heart to the back of the bird.

 

And there you have a flock of pretty birds ready for any type of celebration.

Have a few 'wings' left over.........just add a beak....

Hope you have as much fun making these feathered friends as I do!

xoxo
Sugarpie.

One cool Monkey....

When Jess (huge Macaron and Cake pop fan) asked if I could make a monkey cake for her partner Corey's (Corz) birthday my thoughts ran straight to the Paul Frank monkey faces. Corz is a huge music fan so it seemed natural that his monkey should be rockin' a huge pair of retro inspired headphones.
So here is what we did.

 Our Monkey, lets call him Charlie, started with a chocolate cake base filled with a delicious thick cookies and cream butter cream. top that with a layer of chunky crushed Oreo cookies then do it all over again.

 Two cakes were used to create Charlies face, the top carved for the upper head. Both were covered in rich choc ganache then covered with a light and dark chocolate fondant. His awesome red headphones where black fondant covered donuts (yumm) and shaped fondant band.

Charlie looks pretty happy chillin' on his blue cake board don't you think.

Hope you had an awesome birthday Corz.....look forward to next year  - I hear you have a huge challenge for next time Jess. Bring it on!

xoxo

Samuel's Ark

In may this year my wonderful friends Jodie and Michael asked for a fun Noah's ark themed cake with some cakepops for Samuels christening. Straight away I knew exactly what I wanted to do and this is how it all went...

it started with a styrofoam base, the 'dummy' cake pop was to ensure that proportions were correct..

Each layer was then iced with pale green fondant and green bushes (for the animals to hide in of course)

 Then it was time to cut and add the cute bunting to each layer. Love the candy colours.

Hide a few Zebra's, Lions and Elephantsin the undergrowth..

Then it's time for the ark...

 Then off to make cake cake pop, a base delicious red velvet and cheesecake buttercream..

turned into cute barnyard animals (the sheep were my favourite)

 

Add it all together on the day with extra pops in cute tins on the side and this is what you get...

Amazing cake, amazing day. Hope I get to do another like this one day.

xoxo