Elmo Cake Disaster!

My best friend, Rhiannon, was awesome enough to ask me to make the cake for her son‘s, James, 2nd birthday party. Little James is obsessed with Elmo so she wanted an Elmo cake. Which worked out perfectly because I have an Elmo cake pan. She decided on an Elmo with a guitar, a black jacket, and jeans and a dozen kupcakes with music notes on them. Seemed easy enough. The night before I baked the chocolate kupcakes and the white cake. With the intent to decorate everything before we went to the birthday party. I work up early Saturday morning and was already running into bumps. I ran out of foil to cover the boards. Jesse, being the wonderful boyfriend he is, ran to go grab me some. Once he got back he put the boards together, while I colored the icing and got ready to remove the cake from its pan. Once I started to cake the cake out of the pan, things went from ok to disaster in 2 seconds. The cake didn’t come out of the pan all the way which normally isn’t a big deal. I just put it back together with a little icing and make it look pretty. The cake not only didn’t come out of the pan, but it was crumbling every time I touched it. At this point I had 3 hours before the birthday party and no cake. I broke down and cried. Thank goodness Jesse was there or else it would have only gotten worse. He was able to bring me back and run to Price Cutter and buy a plan sheet cake from them. Once he got back, I had to cut the cake out and start over from scratch. I have never free handed a design on a cake before. I knew that day would come but I thought I would have enough time to plan it out. Jesse turned into my assistant and made more icing as I started on the cake. Elmo isn’t as perfect as I know I could have done but it made me happy once I got to the party and James looked at the cake and said Elmo. I learned a big lesson this time and that was have a plan B ready for my cakes and also that Jesse can’t decorate kupcakes worth a darn.

Here are some pictures of the cake taken by Rene: