Baking: Anatomy of a Birthday Cake

I had my daughter help design this cake for her great-grandma's 90th birthday.  Although I did most of the baking and mixing of frosting while she was at school, both of my kids were around watching as I decorated it.  Hopefully this will at least teach them that even the craziest ideas can be brought about with some work and creativity (and online tutorials). 

After the crumb coat of frosting, comes the next layer of colored frosting (plain old butter cream - recipes abound online).

Love the Viva paper towel trick of smoothing butter cream to look like fondant - yes another trick from online.

Started making the star tip roses on the bottom layer.  Super easy way to cover a cake, but takes a lot of frosting.

Rose layer done.

Basket weave for top layer - check out Wilton's online tutorials if you don't know how to do this.  If you can weave a placemat in kindergarten, you can weave frosting.

Once I added a little border to my basket with a large round tip, I started to construct my chicken out of 2 cupcakes.

It took a few tries at arranging cut up pieces of cupcake, but with some frosting as glue (and a few toothpicks) the hen started to take shape.

Once crumb coating was done on my hen, I placed it on the cake and used a leaf tip to cover with feathers.

After the white covered the hen I added some grey feathers, yellow frosted beak and red comb, plus a couple hard candy eyes (purchased from a craft store).  I then used tweezers to place the yellow coconut (tossed in a plastic bag with food coloring) around my hen as straw.

There's the finished product.  Hopefully this captures my husband's grandma's personality.  She's a gardener who loves & collects chickens.