I am relatively new to cake decorating and one of my friends has asked me to make her daughter's 1st birthday cake. She is doing owls as the theme and has asked me to make a 2-tier cake with a 3-d owl on the top. She would also like the owl to be sitting on a branch and branches coming up the tree. I am having difficulty figuring out how to do the owl part of the cake. If I cover it with fondant, I am afraid that the her daughter will not be able to eat the cake (the owl is to be her smash cake). But I do not know how to decorate the whole owl with different kinds of icing, such as buttercream. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance.

Here is a picture of her party supplies if that helps:
http://www.thepartyanimal-blog.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/owl-party-supplies.jpg

You could pipe buttercream leaves all over the body of the owl to simulate feathers. Do them in different colours.

The other thing you could do is a skinny buche de noel for the log and just a fondant cutout of the owl copied from the invitation. The baby will happily smash the log... There is a cake on the Wilton site with something close:

http://www.wilton.com/idea/A-Hoot-and-a-Howl-Cake

There is also this pattern from Wilton's Celebrate! V book that used buttercream http://www.wilton.com/downloads/patterns/pbCelebrateV_22.pdf