Teeny Owls
I wasn’t quite sure what to make Athina (aka Teeny) for her birthday other than something to do with her favourite animal, owls. I searched heeeeeeaps of images for cake or cupcake decoration ideas but nothing seemed to grab me but I had been subscribed to www.bakerella.com for a while and had always been keen to try the cake pops from there. So I looked into how to make them and looked up different examples for owls – I was quite surprised how many were out there to choose from.
Step 1 = bake a cake
I just went for the standard butter cake recipe from the Edmonds cookbook. I decided it would be real cool to make the inside red – so when you bite into the owl, it’s like you’re biting into its insides (hehe kinda gross but cool at the same time).
Ingredients
- 150g butter, softened
- 2 tsp vanilla essence
- ¾ C sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 ½ C plain flour
- 3 tsp baking powder
- ¾ C milk
- 1 tsp food colouring
Method
- Preheat oven to 180°C
- Cream butter, vanilla and sugar until light and fluffy
- Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition
- Sift flour and baking powder together
- Fold into creamed mixture
- Stir in milk and food colouring to give a soft dropping consistency
- Pour mixture into a greased and lined deep 20cm round cake tin
- Bake for 35-40 mins or until cakes spring back when lightly touched
- Leave in tin for 10 mins before transferring to a wire tack to cool down
Step 2 = crumble cake & mix with icing
The best way to crumble the cake is to cut it into quarters then you rub them together.
Once it’s crumbled up mix it with a good qty of icing (go with ½ cup then add more as needed). Go till you have almost a cookie dough consistency and it sticks together
For the icing I made a standard butter icing with a touch of cinnamon for extra flavour
Ingredients
- 2 T butter
- 2 tsp cinnamon powder
- 1 C icing sugar, sifted
Beat all of the above ingredients together until smooth
Step 3 = roll mixture into balls
Roll the mixture into balls, so that they’re in a size that you can work with. Put them on a lined baking tray, then place in the freezer for at least half an hour so they go hard.
Step 4 = decorate
To make these owls, I put ears on them. The ears were choc drops that I stuck onto the now cooled and hardened balls with left over icing. It was a hot day so by the time all ears were on they needed to go back into the freezer for about 10 mins to cool down again. While they were in the freezer I melted choc in a double boiler.
I then skewered each ball at the bottom (dip the skewer into icing before poking the ball so it holds into place) then quickly dip into the melted choc. Hold the skewer in one hand, then with your other hand tap the holding hand to tap off the excess choc. Put the skewer in a block of foam to stand then before the choc hardens, pop on the eyes (pebbles/smarties with a black food colouring dot drawn on) and the beaks (a heart sprinkle, pokey side out). Once all completed I transferred all cake pops to a new block of foam that I’d wrapped in wrapping paper
We were meeting Athina for dinner so we got to the restaurant first so the staff could hide them till desert time. Once they came out she was very surprised and they tasted DELICIOUS!!
Tags: baking, best, birthday, cake pops, cakes, chocolate, cinnamon, delicious, easy, friends, owl
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 20th, 2010 at 5:13 PM and is filed under baking, birthdays, chocolate, friends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.