Elmo Cake

I'm Heather, and I'm guest blogging today to show you a cake that I made for my son's 2nd birthday. I own the Wilton Elmo shaped cake pan, (although you could certainly do it with an oval pan and cupcakes or something) and had previously made it the traditional way for my first daughter's 2nd birthday. However, I had a really frustrating time actually getting the red frosting that I wanted, and as we all know, that much food coloring starts to taste kind of yucky... Additionally, my husband has really weird food issues (Jello is a form of matter that shouldn't exist in his mind, but flan is delicious but that's another subject entirely), one of which is that he doesn't like food with lots of food coloring. However, he doesn't really know what half his food has in it, so it mostly bothers him if he knows I've made something extra colored. He still won't hear about it when we discuss the fact that cheddar cheese is not naturally yellow, he simply doesn't approve of the children eating colored goldfish, because it must have more coloring than the regular orange ones. :)

Anyway, I didn't really want to go that route again, but I had the fun pan, and my children (and us parents, too, I won't lie) all LOVE The Muppets, so I tried to think what else I could do for a July birthday cake. Fortunately, I had just gotten cherries and strawberries in my produce basket for the week, and I realized strawberry tips are nice and bumpy and fur-like. And cherries are almost black, so I went and bought an orange, and voila! All the colors I needed for Elmo's face. I made a white cake mix and used a light cream cheese frosting to compliment the fruit toppings. My son was so excited, and it was delicious (which I can't really say of the traditional red frosted one his sister got).

Sometimes when I look at the picture, it seems like Elmo's got some sort of stubble/5 o'clock shadow thing going on, and other times it doesn't bother me. :-D If you were really wanting to spend the time and expense, you could fill in all the gaps with smaller bits of strawberries to make him more evenly red, but I was in a bit of a hurry. Also, lest anyone think badly of me, all the tops of the strawberries were chopped and frozen to use in smoothies or strawberry rhubarb crumble.

This used 1 orange, one 1 cake mix, one package cream cheese and some powdered sugar, 5 lbs of strawberries (just to have enough points), and about 1/2 lb of cherries, all split in half.