Chicken Cake
Here's a fun tutorial on how I made my cute chicken cake! For ease, I used my favorite boxed cake mix and store-bought blueberry jam, but made homemade Swiss meringue buttercream. This tutorial is enough to make two small chickens, but you can always make one larger one!
Servings: 8 servings
Equipment
- jelly roll pan 15"x11"
- Round cookie cutters 4" and 2"
Ingredients
- 1 box yellow cake mix Feel free to use any flavor cake mix, or your favorite cake recipe
- 6 cups frosting I made 1x batch of my Swiss meringue buttercream
- jam optional for the filling! I used blueberry jam, but you can also use ganache, curd, mousse, etc.
- gel food coloring I used pink, orange, red, green, and black
Instructions
Bake cake:
- Line a 15"x11" jelly roll or rimmed baking pan with parchment paper.
- Preheat oven and prepare 1 box yellow cake mix batter according to package directions.
- Pour cake batter onto lined pan. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out mostly clean with a few crumbs. Let completely cool in pan.
- Pour batter onto jelly roll pan and bake until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, about 15 minutes. Let cool completely, about 45 minutes.
Assemble chicken:
- Use round cookie cutters to cut out your layers. I decorated two chicken cakes.Each cake had three 4-inch circles for the body and two 2-inch circles for the head.
- Begin building your chicken! I started off with the body first: I laid down one 4-inch cake layer, topped it with Swiss meringue buttercream with jam in the middle, and repeated with the other two 4-inch layers.For the head, I did similarly with the two 2-inch cake layers.
- Attach the head and the body using toothpicks and crumb coat the entire cake with your frosting. Let sit in the fridge for 15-20 minutes for the frosting to harden and the cake to be a bit sturdier.
- Pipe feathers on the cake using a leaf tip. Make the tail and wings by piping the frosting on top of itself.Dye remaining frosting red, orange, black, and pink for the chicken details, and green for the grass. Add eyes, blush, the beak, and red pieces.
- Enjoy! Serve at room temperature so the frosting is soft!
If using buttercream, and the color isn't as deep as you want, try using an immersion blender to emulsify the mixture, which makes it more saturated. You can also melt a tablespoon or two of the dyed frosting in the microwave and mix it back in, which will also deepen the color.
Notes
Leftover cake scraps and buttercream? Make cake pops!
Storage instructions:
