Elmo Cake

Elmo isn't exactly a cupcake...if he was he wouldn't feed 30 people!

A friend of mine asked me to make a cake for his son's 2nd birthday. What he and his wife wanted was an Elmo face cake. This is the first character cake I have ever attempted, I was nervous that the outcome would be something that E and K wouldn't be happy with. Wilton makes a pan for this, but in usual Hey Cupcake fashion, we decided to make our own pan and place Elmo on top of a sheet cake.

The cast of characters was simple and rather basic, I used cake mixes with the instructions found on the Betty Crocker website for a wedding or tiered cake. You use a bit less water, egg whites instead of whole eggs and a small amount of oil. I added lemon zest to change up the flavor just a bit. It will get rid of the commercial cake mix taste very well.

As with a normal cake mix, it is basically "dump" and go. All ingredients in the recipe for the cake go in the bowl of my stand mixer. I love my mixer--I actually have 2, but that is a story for another time. The cake was mixed on high for 2 minutes. I was careful to scrape down the sides of the bowl a few times as well.

Elmo needed to have eyes and a nose that were separate from the rest of his face. I improvised and used my ebelskiver pan for the eyes and a 1/4 cup measure for his nose. Both "pans" were sprayed with cooking spray and floured.

I poured the batter in each well of the pan and then the measuring cup nose as well.

I was a bit over zealous with the cake batter and had to remove about half from each well. The last thing I wanted was a bunch of "eyes" that were stuck together.

This is the cake pan that M formed out of an aluminum 8 inch cake pan, that we bought for a whopping 29 cents at a craft store. Much more cost effective than a 20 dollar Wilton pan that we would most likely never use again. It was also sprayed and floured before the batter was poured in.

Once the eyes and nose were done, I removed them from the pan to cool on a rack.

Now that the cakes were done, it was time to concentrate on the icing. I made a basic butter cream icing and then dyed it the appropriate Elmo colors. First softened butter goes in the stand mixer bowl.

Then I added cream cheese and vanilla, beat it until it was well incorporated. Sometimes I add the vanilla at this stage, sometimes I wait until later...just depends on my mood.

Next, I added the powdered sugar, this time I slowly beat it into the butter mixture, amazingly ---there was no powdered sugar all over the cupboard.

I thinned the frosting just a bit with Half & Half, to make it easier to spread.

One side note, if you are using red food coloring, make sure to get the "no taste" red. For some reason the other red tastes horrible---I'm not sure I want to know what they put in it!

For everything that needs food coloring, we use Wilton Gel Colors. The gel coloring is easy to use, and the colors are more vibrant. It will take much more liquid coloring to get the desired hue, I think it is probably cheaper in the long run. One small jar costs $1.54 at Walmart.

I stirred orange and black in to separate bowls to make the colors for Elmo's eyes and nose.

Looks kinda cool like a spider web.

I then "crumb coated" the eyes and nose. Crumb coating is the first layer of frosting in a decorated cake. The main purpose of this is, once a cake is crumb coated with icing---any stray crumbs you may have are locked into the cold frosting.

This is the sheet cake before the crumb coating.

This is the crumb coating being applied...not really rocket science.

This is Elmo's crumb coating, he was more of a salmon color at first, once it sat for a bit the red coloring became much deeper and a truer red. I also added just a touch of black at the suggestion of a dear friend who has had some experience with red paint.

Once Elmo's eyes and nose were crumb coated, I froze them. Once they had hardened I smoothed the icing to give them more of a fondant look. Then I piped the black pupils on the eyes. I made several eyes as back up in case of a disaster. We ate them later on.

We piped "fur" instead of the stars in the Wilton instructions. It was much more Elmo-ish.

A thick layer of white butter cream went on the sheet cake.

Once all the pieces were complete, I placed Elmo on top of the frosted sheet cake and attempted to write Happy Birthday on top...it took 2 tries.

I was not exactly thrilled with the writing, but it worked out okay in the end.

Adding the 2nd helped quite a bit.

Elmo complete and in his cake box, ready for the party!