Elmo on Safari with a Monkey!

This cake was made for a birthday party for twins at Cartwheels and Coffee.  I was told to include a monkey and Elmo and the colors pink and orange, so I came up with the idea of Elmo on safari, looking for a monkey.  The flowers and the bow in the monkey's hair fulfilled the orange requirement, and the pink car took care of the pink.  The waterfall was so cute and fun to make.  The rocks are brown/orange fondant rippled with brown gel coloring.  The cake itself is vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream frosting and filling.  Everything else on the cake is fondant and entirely edible.

I made the monkey using a tutorial online and I was very happy with how it turned out.  I love the bananas.  And I'm getting better at Elmo, as I've made the little stinker about 45,000 times now.  He really is the epitome of happy and glee, isn't he?  I have a pair of binoculars tucked under Elmo's hand in this cake.

Going Bananas and I Love It!

The cake itself is vanilla pound cake with chocolate butter filling and vanilla butter frosting.  I say butter instead of buttercream because this cake was made without hydrogenated oils per the client's request.  Many of the ingredients were organic as well.  I didn't have a recipe I could depend on for this cake, so I had to test out a bit and I wasted 3 entire 10" rounds to testing.  ACK!  Now I have it, though, for future reference.

The frosting was made without shortening, and I wasn't sure how it would behave, but it came out great.  The only difference was that once it crusted, it crusted a little harder than I was used to and was not very malleable.  I loved the blue color of the background.
The decorations on this cake are MMF.  The monkey is sitting on top of an inverted cupcake.  He was very fun to put together, and is made out of chocolate MMF.  I just need to take a second here to reiterate how much I love moulding fondant.  It is super fun, like playing with playdoh.  Speaking of, when my son is around and I need to work on cakes, I let him play with playdoh while I play with fondant.  HA!

The bananas were labor intensive but also a blast.  They're little crescents, each hand shaped and painted, then piled up on top of each other.  There's something like 60 bananas on this cake.  The "peels" are my favorite.  You just take the crescent shape, slice one end into four parts lengthwise, then flatten them out, paint them, and plop them on.  Easy peasy and oh so fun.
I have been using the hot knife technique combined with the paper towel technique recently.  I first pipe in the filling, hot knife it smooth, plop the top layer on, pipe a large, very close spiral on the top layer all the way out to over the edges, hot knife that, then go around the cake sides with a #12 tip to distribute the frosting evenly, filling in any weird gaps.  Then I hot knife that ONCE or TWICE maybe around.  If you take off too much frosting, then you're going to spend hours adding more frosting.  NOT fun.  Then I let it crust, use the paper towel trick, and continue decorating.

That was a long winded paragraph.  I'm done now!  I really enjoyed making this cake and it was fun to do a different sort of monkey cake.