Noah's Elmo Cake

Noah's second birthday was last Friday, and after a week of celebrating, I think I've finally recovered enough to begin to share a bit of the festivities here. Joy and I are still in a state of denial that Noah's now two years old, but his increasing moodiness and tantrums are helping reality quickly set in.

Noah is current obsessed with Elmo - he sings the Elmo's World theme song all the time, sleeps with a stuffed Elmo, and will stop any forward motion when he glimpses a bit of the red monster. So I decided an Elmo cake was necessary for his birthday.
The problem is that while there is an Elmo cake pan, I didn't want to spend the $12 for a pan I'd use one time (unless Joy decided she wanted Elmo for her birthday...). So I invented my own solution.

Using Misty's fabulous chocolate cake recipe (which she rightly claims is the best chocolate cake recipe in the world), I made two round 9 inch cakes. After they cooled, I carefully cut around the top of one cake to make Elmo's googly eyes and then took part of the leftover cake and stuck it on the bottom of the other. I then mixed up some buttercream icing and set to work with the food coloring. The fully intact cake I frosted plain white and then used a dessert decorator with the round tip to pipe a bit of blue icing as an outline before writing "Happy Birthday Noah!" across its length. Sam helped drop sprinkles on it (as well as write "Noah") and we called that second cake a balloon. For the Elmo cake, I frosted the eyes with plain white and put two black jelly beans for eyes (the black are Sam's favorite - go figure). I mixed a bit of red and yellow to make an orange nose (which Sam loved doing almost as much as eating the left over icing). Then, after using almost half a bottle of red dye, I used the round tip again to pull short lines of icing together to make the top look like fur. It came out pretty well:After blowing out candles with Noah, I cut into the balloon thinking he'd like to save the Elmo part. I was wrong. Noah screamed and cried to eat Elmo first. He loves Elmo so much he truly wants to eat him up.