Thursday, August 20, 2009

Hedwig the Owl Cake

This is quite a belated post because someone just asked me for advice on making an owl cake for her daughter and when I went to point her to my blog post about my Hedwig cake, I realized I didn't have a post about it!

So for my nephew's 6th birthday, he had a Harry Potter party. Having just recently used my new Williams-Sonoma stand-up bear cake pan to make a Dorothy Bear cake. I had this sudden inspiration where I could "see" the owl inside the bear by turning the bear around. The arms become wings, the legs and feet get shaved down to be a tail, and the ears, nose, and bear tail are removed. Now the back of the bear's head is the owl's face.

Can you "see" it?:


Maybe you can see it from this angle:


Anyway, here is how the cake turned out. I really love this particular cake because I was able to create something fairly unique, but I did it using a shaped pan that I already had, so the sculpting was minimized. (Unfortunately, I did have an engineering flaw where I propped up the owl part of the cake with cut off platic straws stuck in the bottom cake. The bottom cake was just from a mix, so not a particularly firm cake, and the straws holding the front of the owl failed in the car on the way over. Poor Hedwig was trying to take a nose-dive and poor hubby was trying to balance the whole cake tray to avoid complete catastrophe. Needless to say, Hedwig needed some repairs on arrival and her beautiful feet were never the same....)






3 comments:

ooolia said...

You are amazing. I never did see the owl until I saw the photo of the finished cake and with several back and forths, I think I finally understand how you did it. That was just brilliant!!!

Real Food, Real World said...

Jill, thank you for this. It's brilliant, and now I can see the construction - I admire your ingenuity!

Susan Z said...

That is cool and very cute.
I know that my mother-in-law mixes a yellow cake mix with a pound cake mix to get a firmer cake when doing a molds.