Sesame Street has the 1st birthday party market cornered!

My friend Jen thinks that Barney is taking over the world. She believes that Barney and all of his kiddie followers are some kind of cult. I am here to tell her that's she's got it all wrong. Elmo and friends are the real cult. I can't get away from this guy!

So, my hairdresser's son turned 1 this weekend. While she was doing an amazing job on my hair one day, we started talking about what we do in our free time (I have free time?!) and I mentioned to her that I do cakes on the side. She asked me if I do kids cakes. Do I do kids cakes?! Those are my favorites! She asked if I could do her son's cake and I agreed. Then she told me what the birthday theme was.... Elmo. AGAIN. Again, I can't get away from him!

I've said it multiple times and I will sayit again, I don't like making the same cake twice. Since this was my 3rd Elmo/Sesame Street cake, I thought it would be a challenge to find a new cake design to try out. Surprisingly, it was pretty simple! Take a look:

Elmo

Cookie Monster

The bottom cakes were yellow cake with one cake filled with banana cream and the other with strawberry filling. The presents also had fondant accents. Elmo and Cookie monster were 3d made of yellow cake, buttercream, and fondant accents.

I also made a little smash cake for the birthday boy. Don't mind Elmo's football head. Sometimes when you do things free hand, it doesn't come out quite right. Ha! I thought he was pretty cute anyway!


Happy 1st Birthday Elliott! I hope you have great time at your party!

Elmo returns... and this time, he brought Cookie Monster and Big Bird along for the ride!

A few months ago, my baby brother asked me if I would make a birthday cake for my nephew's first birthday party. We talked about a theme and after throwing out a few ideas, he landed on wanting an Elmo birthday party. ELMO, AGAIN! That little guy sure is popular!

I prefer not to make the same cake twice, so it was back to the drawing board on what it would look like. I ended up helping out by picking and purchasing the invites. They ended up being great inspiration for my cake!

I thought it would be fun if I made 3D figures of the sesame street characters this time. I started making the character cake toppers a week before and than goodness I did! Those suckers were quite time consuming! They were all made out of a fondant/gumpaste mixture. Here's a close up of Elmo and Cookie Monster.... I LOVED how Cookie Monster was holding on to his very own fondant cookie! Also, notice how they are all wearing diapers! I LOVE IT!

Moving on... I drew up a sketch of what I wanted to do to make sure that what I was thinking of wasn't to outrageous and out of reach. It didn't seem like it was. My brother asked for chocolate cake so I made the top and bottom tiers triple chocolate cake and made the middle french vanilla for the non-chocolate lovers. The top tier was filled with chocolate ganache, the middle tier was filled with strawberry, and the bottom was a banana cream filling. YUM! Here was the end result.....

And a view of the Big Bird side of the cake.... poor guy was not the shining star of the evening....

My brother also wanted me to make my nephew his own little smash cake. Rather than make him his own little cake, I figured, what could be more fun than cupcakes?!

Don't tell me these aren't fun...

The cupcakes were confetti with vanilla buttercream and fondant accents. These may have been the cause of a few gray hairs that mysteriously appeared after I completed them! I loved making them anyway!
Anyway, it was all worth it to see how happy my nephew was on his 1st birthday. Happy Birthday Jadon! Your Aunt Michelle loves you so much!!!

Thanks for looking everyone!

Elmo!

The daughter of my best friend had her first birthday party this weekend. Naturally I said yes when my bff asked me to make her daughter's birthday cake. Once she told me that she had decided on an Elmo theme, I spent an obscene amount of time online searching for some inspirational photos on what to make. I finally decided to purchase an Elmo pan from Wilton and put it on a sheet cake to make sure that it would feed everyone at the party.

For weeks I was so excited about making this cake- I couldn't wait to get started! I wanted to make sure that everything would be perfect. That turned out to be much harder than I thought since I hurt my left hand (I'm left handed) the weekend before the party.

The entire week before the party I worried about how I would decorate these cakes with a left hand that I could hardly move and that was very swollen. What did I do to it? Who knows! When I realized that I couldn't hold my coffee mug, I began to wonder if I had broken it! I iced it practically every second of the day in hopes that the pain would just magically go away before I started baking. Wishful thinking that unfortunately didn't work!

I finally decided to just start baking when I realized that my hand wasn't going to get much better. Needless to say, piping individual starts to color in Elmo's face was torture! I finally got it done in an amount of time that I am embarrassed to even type out. The sheet cake was a lot better since there wasn't too much detail that I was planning on adding.... although it still took me longer than expected.

The day of the party finally arrived and I was excited to have finished the cake! I drove into the city and the terror started. You don't realize how badly city drivers are until you have a stacked cake and cupcakes in your trunk! Thankfully, the cake and I made it to the party in one piece, but we had a few close calls and a few choice words on my part along the way!

So here is the cake! Elmo was a confetti cake iced in a vanilla buttercream. The sheet cake underneath was a triple chocolate chocolate chip (chocolate overload? ;-)) filled with banana filling on one half and strawberry whipped cream on the other.

I also made smores cupcakes. The elmo head on top was candy.


And in case you are interested, I sit here typing this post out one handed with my right hand while the other is still wrapped and under ice :-(