How to Turn Round Cakes into Muppets

Or, “How to Make an Elmo Cake” or “How to make a Cookie Monster Cake” or whatever you like.

For Tommy and Teddy’s second birthday, I decided to go with a bit of a Sesame Street theme. We bought Sesame Street wrapping paper from the Dollar Tree, and I made a pair of Sesame Street cakes.

Aren’t they adorable?! I mean the two-year-olds in party hats, although I will also take credit for the adorable cakes. They were pretty easy, too – want to make some? I just split a regular cake mix between two 8-inch round pans to begin.

See? Plain, round, boring… with sprinkles. I told Greg that this is what Muppet flesh looks like, haha! Now, to give myself a little bit of a guide, I stuck toothpicks into the cake in the shapes I needed.

Yeah, I know it’s kind of hard to see in the picture. It’s really useful when decorating, though, because you can move them around without having smeared, ruined, wasted frosting.

So once you have them where you want them, take the correct color of frosting and outline the shape. (I just used a wide open tip to get a lot of frosting out at once.) Then remove the toothpicks, neaten up the edge, and fill it in. You can see that I couldn’t make the eyes as large as I wanted with the toothpicks in the way, so I did that once I pulled them out.

Then smooth out the frosting; I used the back of a spoon. Here’s Elmo and Cookie Monster with their eyes.

Pro tip: you can make a pretty convincing “black” frosting without black food coloring by mixing red, blue, and green food coloring into chocolate frosting. (I just add cocoa powder to my regular frosting to make chocolate; it just makes it a little darker.)

Then go on to the next section. (I forgot to mention, I made Cookie Monster’s cookie with the chocolate frosting before I dyed it black.)

Elmo needed one more patch of color.

Then for the ‘fur’ I used a big star tip and just made sloppy stars all over. That was it!

I think this technique would work with many different Sesame Street or Muppet characters. I hope you give it a try! (You know. If you have a need for a Muppet cake.)