How to make Angry Bird Cupcakes!

My first attempt at fondant!

Pretty good, if I don't say so myself, hehe. ;)

Here's a run through of my baking process:

Step 1 - Make fondant a day or two ahead of time, wrapped tightly (thanks to CookDuke!)

• There are a lot of random ingredients, so buy them ahead of time! (i.e. glycerin)

Step 2 - Bake cupcakes! I made mine red velvet.  Then add a layer of frosting to the cupcakes for your fondant to stick to (cream cheese frosting for red velvet).  This will be your crumb coat layer, and keep the extra frosting to use as the GLUE for all of your fondant work!

Step 3 - Cut fondant into pieces to make the different colors using gel food coloring by kneading! (yay for years of ceramics!)
Also, do all the fondant work on a silicone mat -- I bought mine YEARS ago and never had a reason to use it, so I finally took off the wrapping and used it WELL. =)

• Main body colors: Red, light blue, yellow, green 
• for these, I made them about the size of a fat piece of pie.
• Other features: White (eyes, yellow bird's chest), lighter green (pig's nose), orange (all the beaks), pale orange (red bird's chest), brown (eyebrows and yellow bird's hair), pale orange/brown (yellow bird's eyebrows), orangey-pink (blue bird's eye bags)
• These features are much smaller, so a small piece of fondant will suffice (about the size of your palm)

-- Didn't take a picture - too messy.  I brought home a bunch of gloves from school to keep my hands from staining  through the kneading process.

Step 4 - Roll out the pieces of fondant 

• I bought a 101-piece cookie cutter set at Wal-Mart the other day for $10, and it had the perfect sized circle for the cupcakes!  But obviously, any biscuit cutter or circular fondant/cookie cutter will do. Maybe even a jar or tupperware lid!

Step 5 - Make the other features with the same colors - birds' hair, pig's ears, etc.

Step 6 - Start the smaller features - I don't have any special cutters, so I had to improvise to figure out the shapes. For everything else, I just molded by hand.

• For the eyeballs - I used the small circle inside the "6" cookie cutter
• Pig's nostrils - straw worked perfectly!
• Beaks - used the curve of the "Y" cutter, and then adjusted by hand

(the hills have eyes! don't they look freaky without pupils?)

Step 7 - pupils! - I didn't have black food coloring, or edible marker, so I really wasn't sure what to do, so it finally came to me! I melted some chocolate with a little bit of shortening (chocolate-dipping recipe) and then used a lollipop stick to draw in the pupils. =)

• I forgot to use the chocolate to color in the pig's ears! But by that time, I was too tired.

and TADAAA!

NOTE - keep a color picture of the angry birds nearby and always refer back to it for color and feature references.  I only have a black and white printer, so I had to use my phone, (obviously, it got really messy)

It took pretty much all day to bake and make all of this, but when my parents came home and saw them, it was worth the trouble.

I should have posted this, and baked that AFTER my midterms were over, but oh well! Too late nowww.

I'll post more baking adventures after I finish my midterms! haha =)