Angry Birds Cake

My friend's son celebrated his birthday recently and I had the opportunity to make this Angry Birds cake for him.  It's a chocolate cake covered in homemade marshmallow fondant. 

It took a little bit of trial and error to figure out what to use for the logs.  The fondant shaped by itself was too soft and sagged when I tried to stack it.  I scoured my pantry for things to wrap the fondant around and tried rice krispy treats, wooden skewers, and cookies.  Finally, as I was racking my brain I found some thick pretzel sticks in my stash of snacks for the kids, and it worked like a charm.  The number 4 in the back also uses the pretzel stick like a skewer to stand up in the cake.

I pressed the fondant logs into a plastic mold that resembles bark, but the impressions weren't deep enough and I ended up using a pick to make the lines more prominent. 

The birds and pigs on this cake are not made of fondant.  They are little toy figurines that my friend had bought.  I'm not a fondant expert and definitely have no problem using shortcuts like these to decorate a cake.    

After I had finished the cake, I felt like it was missing something.  Fondant looks so clean but it's also so flat.  I added some buttercream grass and it added a contrasting texture and dimension to the cake that made it look more finished to me.

I intentionally left space in the front of the cake for the candles.  In retrospect, it would have been cool to put a sparkling candle sticking out of the number 4 and through the TNT box, kinda like it would explode.  Alas, maybe for the next Angry Birds cake.