Elmo Cake

During the summer term of last year I was asked by a close family friend to create a birthday cake for her turning-two year old son. After changing his mind of what cake he wanted from a monster cake to a space cake to an animal cake, he finally decided that he wanted an Elmo cake. You're probably thinking what on earth caused a 2 year old boy to want an Elmo birthday cake, am I right? Well, near to where I live there are two stores, one in the Metro Centre and one in Eldon Square, called Johnny's Cupcakes. They are small stores situated all over the country that make and sell wonderful cupcake creations as well as giant cupcakes too. Now, my family friend's little boy was passing one of these stores when a giant cupcake in the form if Elmo's head caught his attention and so his Mam said that he could have that for his birthday cake. Obviously looking for the cheaper option, I was asked to make the exact same cake...well...as well as I could.
Luckily, for my previous birthday I had been given a giant cupcake mould from my best friend as a present and saw the situation as a great opportunity to use the mould. To make the giant cupcake itself I simply whipped up a normal cake mixture but doubled the ingredients as the moulds were much bigger than normal cake tins. However, the cake itself was the least of my worries, it was decoration that really got butterflies fluttering in my stomach and brain cells dancing frantically at the prospect of creating such a masterpiece with such little practice of experience. I can remember having a lot of trouble with the actual baking of the cake mixture because the moulds were so big meaning there was a lot of mixture, making baking time much longer than I expected it to be. Finally I managed to bake the cake the whole way through and cool it ready to decorate. Before I could do anything else though, I had to cut out Elmo's mouth, however murderous that might sound. I used a knife to cut away at the cake to make a hole in the shape of his mouth, in which I went on to line with black sugar paste to exaggerate the dark hole.
I have no idea how much buttercream I must have made that afternoon but I remember it being rather a lot. To create the 'fur' if you like I piped hundreds of buttercream stars, using a large star shaped nozzle, all over the top of the cake, then for the bottom half I simply used a pallet knife to spread the buttercream around the base. It was then time to make and stick on the eyes of Elmo. To do this I simply rolled two balls of white sugar paste and stuck two small black circles on the front of them to act as the pupils. I then stuck two cocktail sticks in the cake where I was to put the eyes, before then sliding on the eyes onto the end of the sticks. The sticks and the buttercream did a tremendous job of holding the eyes in place and disallowed any disasters of eyes loss or damage.
At this the Elmo cake was practically finished and I was ready to reveal my masterpiece. I somehow did all of this on a Friday night after school in the space of about 4 hours. After a hard school week and welcoming bed upstairs I was extremely relieved to finished after the tears, stress and complications. But I did it, and I won. As much as I love baking and the kitchen, it doesn't half put up a fight when it wants to. Victorious.
Happy belated birthday Joe, though I'm sure I wished it at the time!