I'm hungry too: Elmo Cake

For my little girls 2nd birthday I made her an Elmo cake. This is actually an easy character cake to make. The one thing that worried me the most was getting the icing black enough. Remember that icing will set darker (as I found out) and luckily it did because Elmo was initially more a dark pink than red (used up the last drop of the Wilton red, yep all half a jar of it!)

What you will need:

1 quantity of vanilla cake (baked in a round tin)

1 quantity of buttercream

Black food gel

Red food gel

2 extra large marshmellows (I couldn't find them so I made some white fondant)

2 brown smarties

1 Monte Carlos biscuit

Cut a peak at the top like so.

Mark a big smile and scoop out to form Elmo's mouth.

Dye 1/3 of the buttercream in black and the remaining 2/3 in red.

Apply onto the cake.

I suggest doing the mouth first.

I found applying the icing really fun and somewhat therapeutic (sad yes) but it's so much easier than other cakes because you don't have to be perfect and smooth, infact you should be rough while you slather on the red because it's meant to look like fur. I ended up using a dipping/flicking motion to try get a "fluffy" look. Fun!

Ah right, now the eyeballs. I couldn't find extra large marshmellows or this would have been an even easier cake to decorate. So went with making some white fondant, rolling them out and sticking them on the top of the cake with toothpicks to secure them in place.