We started by making the cake and cutting it into the appropriate rounded turkey shape.
This is the final frosted body (not a brown baseball hat). The front of the turkey is the left and the back is leveled so that we would have something to stick the feathers into. We used chocolate cake and chocolate frosting, which helped hide any little errors or crumbs getting into the frosting. The frosting smelled delicious and I got to smell it all the way to John's family's house as it was sitting on my lap for the car ride.
After the body was done, we made the feathers. We tried to use a cookie cutter as a stencil to pour the hot sugar into, but it didn't work too well and as a result we got this interesting layer of sugar to come off with the cookie cutter.
Instead of the cookie cutter, we poured the sugar onto a silpat and added food coloring and texturing with a tooth pick. We then used the toothpick as a way that we could insert the feathers into the cake.
For the turkey's head, we made some rice krispies and molded it into the shape of a turkey's head. We then covered it with chocolate and gave it a walnut for an eyeball. We put it into the freezer to let the chocolate set up.
We assembled the cake on the back of John's car once we got to his family's house.
The feathers went into the cake alright and looked better than we hoped for. The only problem was the ones we put too close to the back pulled at the cake and threatened to fall down.
We just moved those feathers closer to where the head was going to be and that seemed to solve the problem.
Next we added the head to the turkey to finish it off. We were happy that the head didn't fall over, but after a little while the head slowly drooped backwards. Luckily by then, John's family had seen the cake and how it was supposed to look. There was much delicious feasting with it in the end.
