Elmo Cake

My nephew celebrated his first birthday over the weekend!  Of course, I had to offer to make a cake for the occasion.  When my cousin told me he loves Elmo, I was so happy to get the chance to redeem myself as I made one last year for a friend and the cake was a disaster for me.

This turned out exactly as planned, to a point, thankfully.  This was a standard white cake with vanilla buttercream frosting.  For some crazy reason, I thought royal icing would be a great idea to make Elmo's fur.  I should've stuck to buttercream frosting and a #234 pastry tip.  Also, when I carved out the shape of Elmo's face/head, because I used an 8-inch square cake, I had these straight sides.  So, I fixed that by adding some cake spackle - a mixture of cake and buttercream frosting.  After the crumb coat, you can't even tell.