The Elmo Cake Experiment

For Diego's third birthday (in 2012), the cake and cupcake decorating boom in Spain was well on it's way, so when a friend of mine told me about a website that sells and ships specialty cake decorating items anywhere in Spain, I just had to check it out. 

I had been researching the possibility of making him an Elmo cake, but I needed the Sugarflair Red icing color in order to do so, so I immediately went to check out the website, Maria Lunarillos' online store. When I discovered that, indeed, I could order it online, I was ecstatic! I set out to research everything I could find on making an Elmo cake. The options were endless. I probably looked at about 150 pictures of different types of Elmo cakes in all, but I finally decided to make a round chocolate cake frosted with white buttercream and decorated with Elmo's face and arms reaching up in a celebratory gesture.

As I had almost no previous experience baking cakes, I found the internet to be an amazing resource. I discovered that there are tutorials on just about anything you can imagine from crumb-coating a cake to using piping gel and waxed paper to make an outline of a picture that you can then fill in. You can find some of the tutorials that I used for this cake at the following links: Cakes - Frost Cake Layers Using a Piping Bag, Easiest Elmo Cake Ever. 

I bought all the specialty materials I needed from the online store (black, red, and yellow gel icing colors, disposable piping bags, 3 different stainless steel piping tips (#3, #10, and #27), and piping gel. I looked for transparent wax paper in many stores in Alicante and since I couldn't find any, I asked my Mom to send me some along with a couple of marshmallows from the U.S. to use for the eyes. Lastly, I bought a 28cm (11 inch) round Springform cake tin because I wanted a really big cake, and all of the ingredients for the cake, of course. 

Fortunately, I already had some materials at home that saved me from having to spend even more money, like the Lazy Susan my husband bought one day in Ikea and a straight spatula, which worked just fine for the height of this particular cake, so I didn't have to buy an off-set spatula like they recommended in the video. And both items turned out to be essential, not only for this cake, but for all my future cakes as well!

Then I set to work. I baked two separate layers and filled them with some of the buttercream filling. Then I frosted it meticulously following the instructions of the cake frosting tutorial included above. As it was my first real "work of art", it ended up taking me a long time to finish and, needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night. But seeing the expression on my son's face when I brought out the cake made it worth every minute. Also, all the kudos I received from my friends and family along with the extreme sense of self-satisfaction I felt already had me thinking about my next cake the very next day!