Coolest Cookie Monster Birthday Cake 28

by Karla B.
(St. Albert, Alberta, CANADA)

Homemade Cookie Monster Birthday Cake

My son's first birthday I wanted colorful icing that would show up everywhere when mashed, hence the blue Cookie Monster birthday cake. I am very crafty and a perfectionist and this was my first cake attempt. I've since made a Lightening McQueen, Johnny Tractor and an alligator for my sons' birthdays.

I love making cakes for my boys, but they do take a lot of time. Their birthdays are within a week of each other's so talk about pressure from the bar I've set! I usually start gathering ideas and how to tips from www.coolest-birthday-cakes.com (I love your site). I looked for a cake picture of Cookie Monster that I liked and traced the picture. But I wanted to make some changes I didn't like the cake in the original so I made him hold a cookie.

I enlarged it with the photo copier to get just the right size to fit my cake pan. I used a couple 9x13 sheet cakes to cut and piece together. This ended up a really big cake. I used a chocolate pound cake recipe. I make the cakes ahead and froze them until I was ready to decorate, they stay very moist that way. I find the pound cake doesn't crumble when I carve the pieces.

I followed the directions for the Wilton butter cream icing. I was on the farm and couldn't get the concentrated colors close by, so I used a whole bottle of blue coloring (surprisingly it wasn't bitter). I made the icing the night before because I had heard that's the trick for getting darker, richer colors. It worked because it darkened from the light robin's egg blue that it was the night before, sigh of relief from my husband.

Once the cake was pieced and iced together I used a toothpick to mark where I would outline with black icing. I did all the outlining and then to get the furry monster effect I used a spatula similarly to how you make peaks on meringue. I used bamboo skewers to help move the icing if needed into just the right spot and voila a very cool birthday cake. The only thing I would have done differently is made some brown icing spots to be the crumbs falling out of Cookie's mouth.