Two Cakes for Kahlen

 Alyssa asked me if I wanted to make Kahlen's birthday cake this year. I love making birthday cakes. I don't have any training with it, so things don't always work out the way I hope they will. I try real hard though. Kahlen wanted a farm theme party. Alyssa and I had taken Kahlen and Paxton down to my friend Dawn's house for a weekend in May and Kahlen fell in love with all of the animals she had. Even the chickens, despite one rooster (forever to be known as the "bad chicken") chasing her down and terrifying her.

For her cake she couldn't decide between a horse and a chicken. I'd ask her and she'd say, horse. I'd ask her again and it would be chicken. I finally said, how about both! She smiled and said yes. The horse cake I made out of cupcakes. Lemon cupcakes with blueberry filling. I "painted" a poster board with frosting to set them on. The frosting made the cupcakes stick into place and gave the horse a back ground besides a white board.

The chicken was a lot more complicated.  The easiest part was the nest. Chocolate almond bark, melted and chow mien noodles stirred in, then shaped into a nest. Easy peasy. Kahlen wanted strawberry cake, so that's what the chicken would be. I baked the cakes and then froze them so they would cut cleaner to shape them. I made a strawberry cream filling for between the layers. Quite tasty if I do say so myself. However, tasty did not make for sticky and the layers kept sliding apart. I looked around the kitchen for something to keep the layers in place. I found a reusable plastic straw, I ran it through the layers, and it worked!

 The next step, the head. Dawn's rooster, Ernie, was my inspiration. Ernie, WAS NOT, the BAD chicken. I had been given explicit instructions, by Kahlen, not to make it look like the BAD chicken.

To make the head I used rice crispy treats. They are moldable and stick together pretty good. I molded the head around the end of the straw sticking up out of the cake. I had to hold it together for quite a while. It was hot enough that day that the marshmallows didn't want to firm back up. Once I got it just about where I wanted it I stuck it in the fridge to get it to stay in place.

 Of course every chicken needs a tail. Yeah, yeah, I know, it looks more like a turkey tail, but poultry is poultry. Kahlen didn't know the difference anyway, as long as it wasn't the bad chicken.

The tail kept trying to slip off as well. I called Willie to see if they had bamboo shiskabob (I know I didn't spell it right, not even close enough for spell check to figure it out.) skewers at Lowe's, they didn't. I looked around the kitchen again. A BABY SPOON! I stuck a baby spoon down the chickens tail. It seemed to be working.

The next day I put the finishing touches on the rice crispy head. I turned on the air, turned it way down, (about froze my dad out) and went to work on frosting it.

I started with a crumb coat and put it in the fridge.

 Then I added some details in the base color of frosting and back into the fridge.

While I was applying the gray frosting all I could think of was the movie "Steel Magnolias." Do you know that movie? It is one of my favorites. One of the main characters, Shelby, was getting married, and her groom to be asked his aunt to make the grooms cake. He wanted an armadillo, and they are gray. It was a red velvet cake. They called it the "bleeding armadillo cake." This wasn't red velvet, but it was strawberry.

More details were added. It took quite a while as I had to stop to put it in the fridge every now and then. The end result was pretty good. I think it looked like a chicken anyway.  Next question, would it make the trip to Grimes with out either melting or just falling apart?