Since it was my turn to make a dessert for our after Easter get together, I decided it should be a semi-traditional cake....in a ring shape, with green shredded coconut as nesting material, and a chicken.......but not just any chicken....a rubber chicken. So after Googling many fine images, I made a couple sketches then set to work sculpting the little thing out of coloured marzipan....very much the same way I would make little sculptures out of dough......but you use icing sugar, not flour, to keep the paste from sticking to your hands.
It turned out a little larger than I had planned, but it still fit fairly well on the cake. By the time we got to my mother's house, the chicken had sagged a bit, but that helped it look more rubbery. I'm happy to say the cake was a big success and the beak was the first part to get eaten! I had a foot. Some of the others had the wings and one of my nieces happily devoured the head.
My kids and I also did a variation on a rainbow cake. It's more
difficult to control where the colours go than I had thought it would
be. It seems the colour you want in the middle should go (as batter)
into the pan last.
