Like many seven-year-olds, my son decided he wanted to have an Angry Birds-themed party for his birthday this summer. While I did buy the obligatory King Pig piñata and Angry Birds plates and napkins, I was at a loss for what to do about the cake. A cake has to scream its theme, and you have to get creative if your local bakery doesn’t offer the design you’re after. The Angry Birds friends and foes were nowhere to be found amongst my local supermarket’s cake designs. This left me two options: pay a specialty bakery a lot of money to create an Angry Birds cake or get creative. I chose the latter option, and it was surprisingly easy, cute, and rather inexpensive. Here’s what I did:
- Ordered a cake from Costco. See, I told you this was easy! At around 17 dollars for a half-sheet cake, Costco cakes really are a great value. And, in my opinion, they taste very good. Sure, the buttercream is sweet enough to send your blood sugar through the roof, but the cakes themselves are moist, and the fillings are gooey and delicious. I ordered my cake with chocolate buttercream frosting (they only offer chocolate or vanilla), and I had them leave the cake blank, except for writing “Happy Birthday” to my son at the bottom. Otherwise, it came with no decorations at all.
- Cleaned up the Angry Birds: Knock on Wood game. My family happened to already own this game. You certainly don’t have to buy it for your Angry Birds cake, but I think it’s money well-spent because it really works perfectly as cake décor. I wasn’t about to create my own figurines out of edible materials (they’d hardly be recognizable if I did that). Additionally, many Angry Birds cake decorations I’ve found on the internet are basically similar to this board game, which incorporates the bird and pig characters and plastic “wooden” beams. The benefit to ordering the game: once you’ve used the figures for the cake, you actually have a usable, fun game! It’s only about 15 or 16 dollars on Amazon, which isn’t much more than you would spend on cake décor anyway. I gave my game characters a bath, and they were ready for double-duty as cake toppers.
- Broke out the Nutella. I suppose you could use a variety of materials as “glue” for your wooden structure, but I had Nutella handy, and I thought it worked out great for its purpose. In my picture, you can see I was a little messy with it because I was short on time, but it was very functional and held the structure together just fine, even with those pesky pigs on top of it. Peanut butter would be a good alternative, as well.
- Added some candy décor for a little pizzazz. Although the Knock on Wood game pieces were my main cake decorations, I decided to add some candy “debris” all over the cake to use up the extra space. I used extra candy from the piñata: Skittles and Nerds. But any colorful candy would do. You can get as creative as you want with the surrounding décor, but the key is having the recognizable Angry Birds critters atop your cake. After that, let your imagination run wild!
You could certainly go all out making or purchasing an Angry Birds cake, but if you want to do it in a simple way that will provide entertainment long after the cake has been gobbled up, I suggest trying this fun method.
