Like much of the world, my family is fond of the game Angry Birds. I played it for about a week. To say it was obsessive is a little of an understatement. That game was all I could think about. I couldn't sleep. When I did sleep, I dreamed about those stupid birds. I knew it was time to step away for good when one night, I was stuck on a particular board. I can't tell you how many times I played it, and I thought I had it all figured out. This was it: I was going to kill all those stinkin' pigs. The last bird flew (it was one of those egg-dropping white birds), I let the egg drop...and I missed the last pig. I was so frustrated, I threw my iPad across the room! And that, my friends, was the last time I played ANGRY Birds.
Anywho, Pierce loves the game, and is actually quite good at it. His birthday was a few months ago, and we'd planned to have some boys from his Sunday School class over for their bi-weekly devotional. I thought it would be great for Pierce to celebrate his birthday with them, so I wanted to provide some cupcakes. I couldn't do just plain ol' cupcakes, though. I decided some sort of Angry Bird cupcake toppers would be cute. The only store-bought things I could find were those little plastic rings. Not exactly what I had in mind. I decided to look around on one of my favorite sites, Pinterest. Surely, I could find good ideas for making them myself. I was surprised that I couldn't! There were lots of pictures of Angry Bird cupcakes, but they had either come from a bakery, been made by someone who'd given no instructions to help you replicate them, or they were pictures of marzipan toppers you could buy (VERY expensive, I might add!). What to do? As usual, I posed the question to my friends on Facebook. One of my friends that is quite the artist, shared with me a picture of a groom's cake she had just finished for a friend's wedding. She had replicated their wedding invitation by cutting flower and bird shapes out of sugar sheets. She had a lot left over, and offered them to me. Most of the colors I needed were there: red, blue, yellow, white, and green. Perfect!
I was able to find these black ones at my local Wal-Mart. It was about $5 for a pack of 2- 8 1/2" x 11" sheets.
I started with the pigs. I used the smallest plastic container I could find as my circle for their bodies. I traced around the container with a razor blade. For their snout, a nickel seemed just the right size.
For the pigs' nostrils, I used a straw to cut them out of the black sugar sheets.
To save myself some time (and sanity), I bought a pack of sugar eyes at JoAnn's. To make them stick, as well as the snouts and nostrils, I used just a touch of canned frosting. I used the same size circle for the blue birds, but I used a Campbell's soup can for the red birds. The yellow birds were easy; I just cut triangles and rounded off the corners a bit. I free-handed the white bibs, beaks, eyebrows and feathers...
...like so! My one mistake was putting these on the frosted cupcakes the night before the party. The sugar sheets start to melt just slightly from the moisture of the frosting, so the next morning, my birds were a little droopy. It's best to wait right before serving to place them on the cupcakes.
So there you have it! I wouldn't dare call myself an artist, so if I can make these, you can, too. I should mention that the parents of the teenage boys were quite impressed; the boys, not as much. They were more interested in eating them than looking at them. Typical. Oh well!
