Hoot of a Good Time

This week started the crazy finals week no one looks forward to. Lucky me, I did not have a final this week; they are all the next week coming up! EEK! But that is okay because I was able to relax a bit and focus on a project I had planned on doing for this week.

One of my friends at my work on campus is obsessed with owls, so when I found this cake tutorial on how to make an owl cake, I immediately saved the magazine and kept reading and rereading how to do it. I read it so much that I realized I had memorized it all when I actually did it this week! I found it in the Martha Stewart living magazine I get (for free, of course), and now I make a point to read all of them I receive now because of this awesome owl tutorial.

Well, first I made the chocolate cake recipe I have had for years. I like to call it my own recipe because it is a combination of recipes I have tried for years and years. I like my cakes a certain way and cannot stand dry cakes at all. Yes, they are harder to work with when they aren't dry, but I am sorry, I worry more about the taste then the look of it.
Then you can print off the owl template from Martha's handy website and cut them all out and place them on the sheet cakes, just like this:

I thought the cutting out part was going to be so difficult and messy, but because I let the cake cool for a couple hours (while I got some homework done), it was much easier. I used a tiny knife too, so I could really cut close. The pieces actually turned out good before I even iced the whole thing. I thought I was going to have to ice over some mistakes! Once I cut everything out, I assembled them together to make sure I had everything I needed before diving into the yellow icing:

I am also very thankful I bought more of my icing ingredients than I needed because I had to actually make four times my normal recipe. The owl needed a lot of it! I feel like it just kept swallowing it! :)

And done! I did not have something to carry him into work that fit his entire body, so I had to makeshift a tray for him out of cardboard and tin foil. The pupils are Hershey Cookies and Cream Drops, and the feet/eye ball are chocolate wafers. I was hoping the grocery store carried chocolate wafers because I had never seen them. But I ended up having to make a batch of homemade chocolate wafers; I even had all the ingredients for it already at home. It was perfect.

I ended up having to cut the eyebrows a little bit because they hung off, which made it look cool, but when you put all that icing on them, they sagged like old ladies! It looked awful, so I snipped them a bit and make him have a unibrow.

And you can't tell, but my man owl has got a belly. A big one! I packed all the leftover scraps on top of his body to give him a nice round belly. I should have taken a side shot. Of course, the end result did not look exactly like Martha's owl, but I was still pretty proud of the little guy. It was a lot of hard work.

When I brought it into work, everyone loved it. Who doesn't love owls? They're adorable! The eyes and feet were gone in a matter of minutes, and the next day only the owls head was left. I am assuming the next time I am schedule to work that there will only be cardboard left, maybe even without the tin foil! Who knows! :)