Owls of the Nile

I said Imitated Caterpillar would be my last entry this year. Yet somehow Threadcakes pulled me back in.

I have a borderline-freakish ability to copy patterns, so I figured I'd go with this one, as I've become quite handy with airbrush paints and a teeny-tiny paintbrush

First, I had to figure out the size, so I printed out the design in varying sizes until I had one that would allow for the intricacy of the pattern without forcing me to say "we're gonna need a bigger cake tin". I pulled out my tray-bake tin and used two packs of cake mix (I'm being lazy, sue me) to fill it. Once the cake was out and cooled, I carved it into three owl-shapes. I happened to have some chocolate philadelphia in my fridge and wanted to see how it would go with madeira cake, so I used that for frosting before covering each in blue fondant.

The thing about a pattern like this is that there's very little room for error, if you make one line too long, you can throw off your entire design. And while you can clean the fondant with some alcohol, you could set yourself back by hours. I like to make some reference points on the fondant before starting, with pinpricks in the fondant to mark the most important points (like the size of the beak, the location of the eyes and claws, that kind of thing). Once you've got reference points down, it's a lot easier to fill in the rest, as you know when you're going too far in the wrong direction. I started by drawing the lines with a very fine black food colouring pen, doing thick borders with a bigger version of the pen. Once I'd gotten the outlines right, I filled the rest in by painting with black airbrush colour. Using a paintbrush at this point allowed me to include some of the shading that you just can't get with a pen.

So repeat that another two times and now there's three slightly creepy owls staring back at me. To get them to slot together, I had to cut out small sections from the sides of each, then fill any little gaps with some leftover fondant and paint over them. Once they were arranged on the board, I started painting the branches on. this was actually quite tricky, as the ultimate view was from overhead, but my view was eye-level. There were a few points where I had to set the cake down on a chair so I could get the overhead angle and fix any mistakes (in hindsight, I don't know why I didn't just put it on the chair in the first place). After that, all there was left to do was to take pictures and get eating!

I've never been a fan of mixing chocolate and madeira, but this worked, I think because the chocolate philadelphia isn't full-on chocolatey, but as you'll find with most covered cakes, it's better with the fondant off. Will definitely experiment with that flavour combination again.


P.S. At the eleventh hour I popped onto threadcakes and discovered that someone else had just uploaded an entry with the same design (what up design buddy?). At this point, the amount of pain I was in from hunching over this design for two days would not let me scrap the whole thing. Oh well, great minds and all that jazz

Now excuse me while I go get some physiotherapy for my neck and shoulders