I made this cake for my daughter’s 1 year-old birthday party. It took me a long time to decide on the exact cake, but I knew it had to be Elmo. I think all little kids absolutely LOVE elmo; ok, i’m somewhat fond of the little red monster myself!

This cake is an exact copy of a cake from a Wilton Yearbook, but I can tell you that if you follow the directions exactly from the book, you will not get this result! If you do, please comment here and share your secret! Please!

Here’s how I made this cake:

2 tier cake, bottom layer 14 inch, top layer 12 inch. This cake serves ~120 people, but I only needed ~70 slices, so I made the 12 inch layer using styrofoam rounds instead of cake, and covered the rounds with fondant. The bottom tier that I served was iced with buttercream instead of fondant, just because I don’t care much for the taste of fondant.

The curved yellow pieces are made from fondant. I cut the triangles from rolled fondant, then laid them on a round surface to dry. They will dry hard and hold this curved shape. I used the plastic round pieces from Wilton, to dry the fondant on, but a cardboard paper towel roll would work just as well. I used yellow royal icing to attach the fondant pieces to the cake. The ball border is tip 12 icing piped into a ball shape.

I used rolled fondant for the letters, and cut with alphabet cookie cutters.

Elmo’s hands are formed from rolled fondant. I just eye-balled the shape of the hands from the Wilton yearbook picture. To get the split for fingers, I cut in between and smoothed out the edges with my fingers, then left the “hands” to dry.

The yellow crayon is rolled fondant. I rolled it between my fingers to get the long-round shape, the made the end pointy. Then I took a knife and carved a little indent around the top. I used a similar method to get the two thin black lines. I rolled black fondant between my fingers until it came out long and thin, then wrapped it around the crayon. I used a yellow food marker to draw yellow scribble marks on the yellow tier cake.

Here’s where Wilton’s yearbook instructions do not work:

The Elmo head. Using the Elmo cake pan, Wilton says to melt white chocolate and fill the eye area, orange chocolate to fill in the nose area, and 4 pounds of red chocolate to fill the pan. I was seriously scratching my head on this one, even before I started. I couldn’t figure out how I would get a round object that is over 4 pounds to stand up straight on one end without falling over. I never figured that part out, because I found that I couldn’t get 4 pounds of chocolate in the pan without having massive cracks in the chocolate. When all was said and done, these instructions simply did not work for me. I was seriously sweatin’ this one, cuz my daughters birthday was the following day, and my kitchen was a total disaster area, my husband had to take time off from work to care for our daughter while I experimented and figured out an alternative. I was so bummed because I had already put at least 40-50 hours of work into this cake, and the most important part was turning out to be a total disaster! BUT! I DID come up with a better idea, and I loved the final result!

Here’s what I did:

Using the Elmo cake pan, I colored gumpaste with colors to correspond with Elmo’s features: red for Elmo’s face (close as I could get to Elmo’s color), orange for his nose, white for his eyes, and black to fill in the mouth area. I covered the entire pan (outside) with a solid piece of gumpaste that was rolled out very thin. Using my hands and fingers, I pressed the gumpaste into all the indentions of the pan to bring out the features. Then I rolled out white, black and orange with similar thickness and used the same technique to cover the eyes, nose and mouth. Before the gumpaste dried, I trimmed all the edges. Once all the gumpaste dried, remove the gumpaste form from the pan. It’ll be very hard (but breakable if it drops!).

When everything was dried, and the pieces came together, I was not happy with the shade of red, and the texture of the gumpaste didn’t look that great. To fix this, I melted some red chocolate and brushed it on the face and hands. I believe that this technique was exactly what Elmo needed. It was the perfect color, and the texture looked more like his matted hair.

To make Elmo’s face stand up straight on the cake, I used a piece of tier support plastic to prop his face up from behind.

This cake served ~85 people.