Sweet Bird Themed Baby Shower Cake with Chocolate Transfers! Video

Hi everyone! In today’s cake decorating video tutorial, we are demonstrating how to create a very sweet bird themed baby shower cake. Our birds are made very quickly and easily using the chocolate transfer method.

I love to work with chocolate candy coating (also known as chocolate bark, compound chocolate, or candy melts) because the chocolate can be melted, piped, chilled, and placed onto the cake in a matter of minutes.  

A google search of Chocolate Transfers will likely lead you to decorative sheets of acetate with cocoa butter designs that can be transferred to chocolate. We actually have a blog tutorial on these Chocolate Transfer Sheets if you are interested!

However, the Chocolate Transfers that we are creating today refers to something very different–a method that is extremely useful in cake decorating. This technique is great because templates can be easily traced over when creating designs for your cake.  It’s also fun to change things up a bit when it comes to your decorating mediums and I love the unique look!

We hope that you enjoy it!

Materials:

This design could be adapted to fit any cake or even sheet cake. We used a two tiered design– 8 inch bottom tier with 6 inch double barrel tier on top.  We frosted our tiers with our Fluffy Vanilla Buttercream Recipe.

Template for Birds & Nest

Chocolate Candy Coating {We used Approximately 8oz (232g) white candy coating for the birds & leaves, and 4 oz (116g) brown/chocolate candy coating for the nest.}

Candy Coloring Gel- We used Americolor Candy Color-Blue, Yellow, & Green. When working with chocolate, do not use regular coloring gels which are water based. You can also find pre-colored candy melts/candy coating if you prefer to go that route.

Buttercream- Your preferred vanilla buttercream. We used our Fluffy Vanilla Buttercream recipe.

Coloring Gels: We tinted our frosting with Americolor Sky Blue and Electric Green

Waxed Paper or Parchment for the transfers (parchment is more difficult to see through)

Piping Tips: 4, 21, 352 (leaves)

Miscellaneous- As with any tiered cake, you will need cake boards and supports. We used  a cake board cut down to size for each tier, and one within our double barrel top tier about halfway up. We also used bubble tea straws for support. 4 in the bottom tier, and 4 in the bottom half of the top tier.  Our cake is sitting on a pedestal and does not have a center dowel. However, if transporting the cake, you may want to hammer in a long sharpened dowel through the cake and into the bottom cake base to anchor everything.  The cake base would be 4 cake boards wrapped with your covering of choice (we often use a plastic tablecloth to wrap our cake bases.)

Notes:

It is helpful to apply chocolate transfers to the cake when they are still chilled. You can handle them more easily. We only chill them in the freezer for approx 5 minutes or until firm. If you are not ready to use them yet, you can move them to the refrigerator. They are also fine at room temperature, but they are more fragile to handle.