Naturally I jumped on the chance to make them for the baby shower! I emailed my friend and basically informed her we were making them together. On Martha's site she gives recipes for cake and the icing, but to make life simple...we bought white cake mix and butter cream icing in a tub.
After I had decided to make these, one of my friends had made cupcakes and had dropped food coloring down into the batter filled cups to make them marbled.
So, naturally, I wanted to do that too! We put half the batter into the cup, swirled some blue food coloring around, and then put the rest in and repeated. That way it was more incorporated into all the batter since my friend's swirls were just on the top.
After the cupcakes were all baked, we iced with the regular icing, then took the leftover icing and split it up to make blue and yellow icing.
Sorry I didn't take too many pictures of these, but I had icing and food coloring all over my hands!
I unfortunately didn't have the correct piping tips, but I had ones I figured would work. One was a star tip, which created an interesting look with the bird's bodies. Sort of gave it a featheredish look. Then I had a tiny round piping tip that I used to create the beaks. I melted a piece of my yummy Guiridelli dark chocolate I had on hand and used a toothpick to add the eyes. Some of them were droopy, but the way the rest of the bird looked, it didn't matter!
Once all the piping was finished, we added toasted coconut to make the nest. Since some people, like me, don't like coconut; we made some of the nests out of chocolate sprinkles.
I guess I should show you what they looked like...just remember I had only used a pipe bag once before this, not successfully, and this was my first (and probably last) time making these!
They actually seemed successful at the baby shower, I got lots of compliments and such...but I'm still disappointed they didn't exactly turn out correctly. At least you can tell what they are. Not to mention they tasted really good!
~Taylor~
iPhone pic:
