From the "better late than never" files...
My little boy turned three at the end of April. THREE! I can hardly believe it. Wasn't he just born yesterday?
He is, like most preschoolers, quite opinionated, and he was adamant that he wanted an Angry Birds birthday party. His obsession with Angry Birds kind of cracks me up -- he went through a phase where he did pull up the game on my phone all the time (not that he could actually play it -- he'd just fling the birds in the wrong direction -- but he liked to listen to the music or watch me play it), but I can't remember the last time I saw him do that. But despite not playing the game, he loves his stuffed Angry Birds and his Angry Birds t-shirts and all that other stuff. And, well, *I* love Angry Birds (I had to MAKE myself stop playing it, it was such a huge time-waster), so I was all over an Angry Birds party.
Knowing that the birthday boy vastly prefers cupcakes to regular cake (what kid doesn't?), this is what I did for his cake:
I'd seen these scattered over Pinterest and various other places online; I didn't really need a tutorial per se because they're pretty self-explanatory, but this post from The Crafting Chicks is the one that I referred to.
These were fiddly, but not difficult, to make. I made a single batch of buttercream, split it into quarters, and dyed each quarter a different color. After frosting the cupcakes, I also used Wilton colored sugars for a little bit of texture and sparkle because, well, what isn't improved by a little bit of glitter? The eyeballs are half mini-marshmallows; the beaks are gummy orange slices; the white bellies are slices of regular marshmallows; the pig nostrils are chocolate chips; and the eyebrows and pupils are chocolate twizzlers that I cut up (I couldn't bring myself to use black licorice rope, because ew).
The pigs were the hardest to do -- their snouts are half-marshmallows, and it's surprisingly difficult to frost a half marshmallow. I was afraid that my nails would be food-dye-green forever, but to my great relief it all washed off with no trouble. (In all the cake decorating I've done, I've never gotten THAT messy before!)
It occurred to me after the fact that the yellow birds should have had white bellies and the blue birds shouldn't have (I was following the designs on the blog linked above, but they had it backwards too). I don't think anyone else but me noticed that, though. :-)
These were a HUGE hit. Ian LOVED them, and I think our guests did too. Absolutely, totally worth the time and effort.
The title of this post is a bad pun on the ca-CAW noise/call that the Angry Birds make in the game. Sorry.