Elmo Birthday Cake

I wanted to make a birthday cake for my niece's 2nd birthday and her mom told me that she's into Elmo and Barney.  I'm not very partial to Barney so I decided to make an Elmo cake.  Her mom also wanted to stay away from too much food coloring so the cake is carrot cake with buttercream frosting; I also made and placed the decorations in a way so they could be easily taken off.  Since my niece is turning 2 and won't be a baby much longer, I made a "baby Elmo" cake topper.

Instead of rimming the bottom of the cake completely with fondant, I sporadically grouped fondant balls (so they can be easily taken off).

Right view:

Left view: 

Aerial view:  The letters were cut out of a mixture of fondant and gum paste and I surrounded each letter with sugar confetti (I put them on one at a time with tweezers).  I thought the mosaic effect of the confetti was pretty cool!

Sesame Street sign: I used yellow sprinkles to create the sign's border.

One more picture:

 HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADDY!!!

Brave Cake Truffles

These "Brave" cake truffles from the Scotland Highlands were for a 9-yr old's family birthday party.  Her mom basically asked me to create something for her daughter and mentioned that her daughter really wanted to see "Brave" for her birthday.  I wavered between making "Brave" cake pops or cake truffles, but due to the design, I settled on cake truffles.

The design of the two dozen "Brave" cake truffles include Melinda, a target & arrow, Eleanor's crown, three bears, and gold leaves with yellow pearls.  The butter and chocolate cake truffles were first covered with blue candy melt and then covered with a piece of blue fondant to achieve a smooth finish.  All of the decorations were hand-molded from fondant with the exception of the leaves and flowers; I used a cutter.

Close ups:

Aerial view:

Packaged and ready to go!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Perry the Platypus Cake Truffles

These Perry the Platypus cake balls were made to celebrate the launch of Disney's "Agent P Strikes Back" online game.  As part of my research for this project, I ended up playing several minutes of the game which included collecting coins in the shape of platypus feet and battling robots; it's quite a cute game!

Here's a link to the game:  http://disney.com/agentp
This URL also works on mobile Safari/Chrome browsers too!

Blue and yellow candy melt were mixed to match Perry's turquoise color.  I came up with using a little star-shaped fondant cutter for the feet and a Rolo candy on top of a circle of fondant for the detective hat.  I mixed my own orange and brown fondant since I usually only have a few colors on hand (primary colors, white, and black).  The hats were allowed to dry overnight before I attached them to Perry's head with a dab of candy melt.

I sometimes delay putting eyes on my creations due to the discomfort factor of having so many pairs of eyes staring at me...it's a bit disarming.  Makes you wonder what the guy in the lower left-hand corner is looking at.

This brigade of partially finished Agent P's made me a little nervous when I went to bed around midnight; I kept wondering what mischief they might be up to downstairs.

Perry's tails were hand-molded and detailed.  All the vanilla Perry's have straight tails and all the chocolate Perry's have slanted tails.  For the final detail, each detective hat was rimmed with black "ribbon" making Perry an official cake agent.

Aerial view for Agent P's different expressions:

Agent P's packaged and ready for their next assignment: 

Estimated time for this mission: 7 hours.

For the Perry fans out there, there's also Disney's iPad/phone app puzzler game called "Where's My Perry?" modeled after "Where's My Water?"  It's Disney's number one phone app right now, and I downloaded it this morning and it's really fun!

CONGRATS TO THE DISNEY TEAM THAT WORKED SO HARD ON THIS PROJECT!!