One of my friends I went to high school with asked if I could make her brother a cake for his first birthday around this time last year. You can see the post here. 🙂 And very kindly of her, she asked me to make his second birthday cake, but instead of monkeys this time – Elmo themed!!!
I was so excited, because Elmo is so cute and I was just so excited in general.
She asked for a two-tiered cake – chocolate and vanilla with buttercream in between the layers. I made the bottom cake, 8″ round with 4 layers of chocolate and vanilla. I then buttercreamed the outside with red food colouring, and let that sit for around 30 minutes so the red could get much darker. I find when adding red food colouring to (white) vanilla buttercream, it always turns out pink. The trick is, the longer you let it sit – the darker it will get. Ideally if you can let it sit overnight, it will turn into a beautiful dark red – but I didn’t do that because who has time for that?! Not me!
I then did all the decorations using fondant. For the top layer of the cake, I made three, 6″ round chocolate cakes and stacked them with vanilla buttercream in between the layers. With that same icing, I buttercreamed the side of that cake and stuck him on top. Man, was that ever scary placing that other cake on top. I just didn’t see it ending well, but luckily it did! I used this awesome cake stacker, Cake Boss tool thing and it worked like a charm.
And again, I used fondant for all the extra little decorations 🙂
Hope you enjoy this cake (and to my friend’s brother/family! Hehe)
Crumbs and Tea 