THE BIRDCAGE CAKE

Joy and the 2nd anniversary cake!

 Isn't she beautiful, my firstborn daughter, Joy. She is pregnant with her first child and its a boy. How exciting! She is the sweetest girl with a heart of gold. She is a physical therapy assistant and it is beautiful thing to watch her with the elderly bringing so much joy and encouragement in their lives. Last October for my birthday she took me to see Michael Buble in Orlando. Now, I love music a lot, but do not love big crowds, so I never go to concerts. As far as still living male singers go, in my opinion, Michael Buble stands alone at the top. There is something about his voice that moves me very deeply . I listened to him on and off for over a year without ever seeing a picture of him. I was surprised to see how young he was. Anyway, my daughter took me to see him and we stayed at a hotel within walking distance of the arena. We had a blast. Thanks so much for that fantastic night. It is one of the musical highlights of this last decade for me.

This week I wanted to make my daughter a cake and for her 2 year anniversary. I had made her cakes for her for the wedding and they turned out beautiful. They saved one small cake for there one year anniversary. When they went to go eat it, it was bad, very bad. So I promised them I would make them a cake this year. I didn't want to repeat the same cake I made which was a ruffle cake.

As I was looking through cake pictures on pinterest I came across a beautiful birdcage cake and it reminded me of the birdcages all the bridsemaids carried their flowers in. Joy has all the birdcages in her house displayed up high above her counters.

So, I began by making 3 small cakes all the same size. Now my cakes for whatever reason always come out of my oven dome shaped and I always have to level them off. I hunted around for ideas on how to make the dome part of the bird cage without having to ball a spherical pan. Most sites sad to use a oven proof bowl the same size as the pans. The only thing I could find that was oven proof in my house were small Pyrex bowls. So along with the 3 cakes, i filled 3 pyrex bowls with coconut cake batter from a boxed mix.  All  of the cakes cake out domed, but none of them came out perfect..Most of them were leaning bad to one side. I didn't use any of the Pyrex ones. I chose the best looking one from my tiny spring form pans.

not so pretty right now!

After cooling the cakes on racks,  I leveled two of the cakes and left the 3rd one unleveled for the dome. I stacked the two cakes on top of each other with buttercream icing in between and on top. I then placed the dome on top of that. I tinted my icing ice blue or as close as I could get it, since I started with butter flavoured crisco, which is not white but kind of yellow. I crumb coated the entire cake and let it crust in the fridge because it is very hot here today.

While it was in the fridge I worked on making  fondant decorations. The picture that i was following, showed string like fondant for the cage itself. After many attempts of trying to roll the fondant into skinny pieces, I gave up. I then pulled out my fondant slice and cut edge cutter (kind of like a paper cutter) and cut thin strips of fondant. i measured the circumferance of the cake and divided it by 4 and marked each four inches with a toothpick at the bottom of the cake. I then laid the strips from top to bottom. I made a thicker strip to go around the cake at the bottom. I made a circle topper out of a biscuit cutter and laid them on top of the cake. I rolled fondant into a ball and attached it to the very top. I made several flowers out of white and pink and attached them randomly to the cake. I also made a  couple of birds from my impression mat. It turned out pretty good. Not too bad for first try. My daughter loved the cake.