Elmo Birthday Cake!

On December 22, 2010, my youngest brother, Jordan, turned 5! I can't believe that it's been 5 years already since he was born and I'm officially at the point where I can't remember what our lives were like without him. In honour of his birthday, I decided to make him an Elmo cake :)

I wanted to use a hemisphere cake pan so that it would be a life-like visual of Elmo's face. I bought Fat Daddio's 8in hemisphere cake pan from Golda's Kitchen and followed the staff's instructions to bake the pan on top of a round cookie cutter so it's balanced while on a cookie sheet. I thoroughly greased the pan because I wasn't sure how it would stick if I didn't. Allow me to tell you now from experience that you must grease the heck outta this pan! GREASE UNTIL YOU CANNOT GREASE ANY MORE! And then, grease it up a little more. I used butter which was great except that a chunk of the cake didn't come out of the pan. Not a huge problem as I was able to put it back together in the end but I still would have preferred a smooth balanced cake.

Anyway, once that was done, I used a Wilton 1M star tip that looks like this:

Photo Courtesy of CakesUnlimited

With the 1M tip, I piped the red frosting all over the cake in connecting stars.

Then I cut 1 jumbo marshmallow in half for the eyes and piped some black frosting on using a Wilton #12 tip. I have discovered that using AmeriColor's Super Black colouring is AMAZING! 

After that, I added his nose and mouth. I may have overdone the nose a bit and should have used a stencil for his mouth but I'm happy regardless. Here is the finished cake :)

And one better, here is the birthday boy with his special cake. Please disregard the smushed icing on the front of the cake... We had a little incident! OOPS!

Keep baking!

tamara