Mmmm....cake.

I was given the opportunity to make the birthday cake for our friends' daughter, Caroline. She turns two next weekend, and I was excited to have the chance to make her cake again! You might remember her giraffe cake that I baked last year. I think that giraffe cake may very well be one of my favorites to date.

Anyway - This year they were having an Elmo themed party, since that little red booger seems to captivate the attention of every child under the age of 4. I'm pretty fascinated by this. I mean, really - Lilah cannot keep her eyes off of him when we come across Sesame Street. I can't tell if she's looking at him like she'd like to also have him as a pet, or if she's looking at him the way she looks at other babies and small kids. She has a similar look of fascination and glee with both.

But I digress - we were talking about cake! I was given carte blanche with the design, so I just sort of looked up a few pictures of Elmo, considered the size cake we were looking at, and went for something I thought I could actually reproduce, since I am SO not an artist (although I seem to do better at reproducing in icing than on paper. Go figure). So here in all his red, furry monster glory, I present: Elmo

From seeing "Elmo's World" a couple of times, I knew that Elmo was into crayon drawings. So I wanted to incorporate that into the design. The border was a drawn blue squiggle and I made the "Happy Birthday Caroline" look like Elmo had put some fun squiggles at the end of each word, because he's 3, so he would totally do that.

Close up of Elmo. He wasn't quite right in the eyes, but pretty darn close. I used the multi-faceted "grass tip" to make Elmo furry. And yes, that is a big crayon in Elmo's hand. A big, EDIBLE crayon.


The crayon was made on a whim; I knew I wanted a crayon but had figured I would just pipe one. Then I saw that I had pretzels. And Marshmallows. And for some freakish reason, blue candy melts. So I speared the marshmallows onto the pretzel rod and made candy clay using the melts to make a very realistically waxy-looking crayon!


We can't forget Elmo's good friend, Dorothy! So the border was a ton of oddly-spaced Dorothies. Because I may be able to draw an Elmo from scratch, but I can't evenly space things for crap.


Here's the cake at the party. The birthday girl wanted to touch it RIGHT AWAY. But we managed to keep her from sticking her fingers in it until she had her own, personal slice :-)

We had such fun at the party; the weather was PERFECT for an outdoor event and the playground is one of the nicer ones I've seen. The older kids really enjoyed it. It was perfect except for the uninvited guests of some yellow jackets, who were after our food. But I had so much fun with this cake, and I look forward to making more cakes in the future for sweet little Caroline!