The Birdhouse Thief

I chose this design mostly because I love trees and thought this would be a good challenge. I knew I would need some support but since I wanted it to be mostly cake I enlisted my husband for ideas. He ended up using a copper tube screwed into a wooden base. The tube runs from the tip of the foot to the top of the leaves. I started with an apple chocolate cake recipe I'd been wanting to try out. This turned out to be a big mistake because, since I wanted to use as little support as possible, the cake was too soft to hold up and fell apart while I was putting the leaves on. Not one to give up easily, I simply made more cake (this time I used pound cake) and kept on going. The second cake held up great and was able to hold the fondant birdhouses I stuck on it. The arms and legs are modeling chocolate and the details are all hand painted fondant. Altogether I think it took about 20 hours. I really had a lot of fun making it and my family had a lot of fun eating it!