Sesame Street Birthday Cake

I don't get a chance to make kids' birthday cakes very often since I don't have any kids myself and all my nieces and nephews live out of state.  Because of that, I am not in the loop regarding the cool cartoons and shows kids are watching these days.  Luckily, the mother requested Sesame Street for this 2nd birthday cake.  Sesame Street, I can do!  I watched it as a kid and think it is pretty cool that kids are still watching it today! 

Google "Sesame Street Cakes" and you will get about a billion inspiration pictures.  So many in fact, it was kind of overwhelming and made it hard to narrow down my ideas for the cake.  I really wanted to practice figure modeling and decided on a design that featured the birthday girl's favorite characters. 

Since I didn't need a lot of servings, I decided on a single 10 inch cake with all the figures on top looking like they were throwing a party for the the birthday girl, complete with a mini-cake with a number 2 on it.

I don't have a lot of experience modeling figures, so I was very nervous about getting them to look like the actual characters.  Every other time I have modeled figures, I have used a tutorial as guide. This time, however, I just downloaded a bunch of pictures of Elmo, Grover, and Big Bird and tried my best to figure out how to sculpt them on my own.  It took a couple of tries to get Elmo correct, which is definitely frustrating, but I do think you learn more from the trial and error process.

 

 

 

I was actually pretty pleased with how they turned out!  I still need to work on getting better at modeling arms and legs, but their faces looked pretty accurate. Most importantly the birthday girl identified all the characters by name right away which pretty much made my day!