A few people have asked where my Facebook photo (above) is from, and this is it. The clown was created (modified from an existing character I had made) and this animation completed in 2 days as a quick test. The audio is from a sample video from Hollow3D.

Check it out after the jump (hehe I’ve always wanted to say that…).

Edit: I just realized not everyone will know what the original Oliver looks like so here’s a couple of pics. Oliver in Botswana (driven by the Stig) and the restored Oliver with Richard Hammond.

Just 5 minutes a day is all it takes

Very few people take the time to schedule properly. It’s often seen as a waste of time, and therefore given a very low priority. I must have heard the excuse a thousand times “But I’ve got to get this finished, getting the work done is more important.” This attitude is most prevalent in people who feel uncomfortable, or unable to estimate task lengths. And instead of working on the problem they choose to ignore it.

Scheduling is often seen as a Management tool that’s of little use in the real workplace. This is often enhanced by difficult scheduling procedures that some managers put into place. I have seen some scheduling procedures that really do take more time than the work itself. This approach is both unproductive and unnecessary. Scheduling exists to make life easier, not more difficult.

Once you settle into the routine of regular monitoring of your progress it becomes easy. Literally 5 minutes is all it takes, whether you do it as you complete each task, or do it at the end of each day.

 

Benefits of scheduling

The benefits of proper scheduling are abundantly apparent once you start putting it into practice.

1. An accurate record of what you’ve done and how long it’s taken.

Have you over looked back over a period of time and wondered what you did? I know I have often looked back over the last week wondering why I didn’t accomplish more. With proper scheduling you can look back and see exactly what you did. More often than not this feeling is caused by an unexpected problem, or a problem that took longer to overcome than expected. The schedule can be very reassuring in times like this.

2. You’re better prepared for next time.

With a good schedule, when you need to do the same or a similar task to something you have already done, you can merely look over the schedule to see how long it took, what problems there were, and estimate more accurately how long it will take this time.

3. A record of personal progress.

If you have a number of tasks that are similar, more often than not each successive task will take a little less time than the last. You can look at your schedule with pride seeing how you’ve improved from task to task.

4. A solid foundation for quotes.

When you next quote for a job you can look over your schedules and, if you have done similar tasks before, see exactly how long they actually took, or if you haven’t done the task before you can see what patterns emerge from previous estimates of untried tasks. More often than not you will find that you tend to underestimate the length of time something will take.

Unfortunately our memories aren’t adequate when it comes to doing this. Over time it’s easy to forget the difficulties involved with a job. You might remember a previous job taking 3 weeks, but forget that the last week involved 16 hour days with a couple of all-nighters at the end. Next time you quote for a similar job you may under-estimate the hours involved and be caught in the same situation again. Conversely you might remember a task taking 3 days, but forget that 2 of those days were spent solving a problem that won’t be an issue next time now that you have a solution. Next time you quote a similar job you may over-estimate the hours involved.

With a schedule you no longer have to rely on memory, or loosely recorded times. You can break down a job into individual tasks, and accurately estimate times for each of those tasks. This will make your life and the clients or employers lives much easier.

One issue that often arises from clients is when certain tasks will be complete within a job. Clients are usually results based. If they don’t see something they assume nothing’s being done. Unfortunately the reality of production is that often there may not be something to show early in the process. Planning and pre-production rarely reflect the amount of time involved, or while you’re animating there may be elements of the scenes that are unfinished so you hold off on final rendering until later. With a history of scheduling you can accurately convey to the client at the start of the job how long various aspects will take and when they can expect to see certain results. You can explain if they want to see a particular result early in the process how it may adversely affect the total time for the job.

 

Part 2 – Scheduling example

I first found this scheduling technique on the web. A programmer had developed a quick and easy system for monitoring his own progress. Since programming is one of the more difficult areas to estimate I knew I was onto something good. I have since lost my records of who this person is, but I credit him with the fundamental principle of this method.

Disillusioned with complex scheduling packages such as Microsoft Project, I put this new found method into practice straight away, initially expanding on the example I had to make it a little more useful in a production environment. Since then having scheduled and quoted many projects, both solo and team projects, I have enhanced the schedule far beyond its initial form. The schedule uses Microsoft Excel and, I must stress, is not meant as a replacement for MS Project or other project management tools. It is meant to accompany those tools when dealing with a large project.

Download the Excel file used in these examples.

Preparation

The basics of the schedule involve breaking down a project into major features. For example if the job is to create a 3D character you might break it down into:

• Modeling
• Morphs
• Texturing
• Rigging
• Tweaking

Then break down each feature into specific tasks. For example:

Modeling
• Head
• Body
• Extremities (hands and feet)
• Clothes
Morphs
• Mouth expressions
• Eye/eyebrow expressions
• Lipsync targets
Texturing
• Head
• Body
• Extremities (hands and feet)
• Clothes
Rigging
• Weight maps
• Bones
• IK
• Muscles and joints
Tweaking
• Model
• Morphs
• Textures
• Rigging

The idea is to break down to the point that each task is estimated to take less than 8 hours, if possible. It’s very important to take your time during this step. I have witnessed people use this schedule without breaking down the job properly, either into features or tasks, and as a result receive much fewer benefits.

The next step is to estimate as accurately as you can how long each of these tasks will take, and place these estimates into the Initial Estimate column. Now copy these values into the adjacent Current Estimate column. As you can see the time remaining column is filled out for you. This will also give you an estimated finish date.

You can also fill out priority orders for the tasks in the Priority column. You can use as many priority levels as you wish, but I usually find 3 is sufficient.

Maintaining the schedule

Now that your schedule is ready to be put to use we come to what is probably the most important step, maintenance. As you work on each task, fill in the Time Elapsed column. You can also update the Current Estimate column as soon as you have a better idea of how long it’s taking. When you have completed a task, change the Current Estimate column to reflect the amount of time it actually took.

Now you have a record of how long you estimated a task to take versus how long the task actually took. This will be useful in the future.

I have also provided a couple of visual clues as to the status of a task. As a task is completed it will automatically get crossed out. Also tasks given priorities of 1 and 2 are highlighted for easy recognition. You can see towards the bottom of the worksheet as you complete tasks how many hours you have spent on the project, and an estimate of how many hours are left. This is very valuable when discussing your progress with the client.

Quite often as you get into the project you will find it useful to change some of the breakdowns. You may see a need to breakdown a task even further, or add to features or tasks that you had not anticipated initially. The beauty of this system is that you can do this quite easily, just by adding to the bottom line. All of the pertinent values will be immediately updated, reflecting your change.

Project Management

This schedule is very useful when dealing with other aspects of managing a project such as working to a deadline, and optimizing productivity. When you fill in the starting date for the project in the header, you will see a number of other values are calculated:

Estimated finish date is based on your current estimate of task times and your expected hours per day. This is a good indication of how long the project should take.

Projected finish date indicates how long the project is likely to take, based on your current task estimates and your average hours per day instead of your expected hours per day.

Average hours per day is the average of how many hours you’ve actually worked on the tasks listed. Sometimes you may work on multiple projects at once. You will probably want to reflect this in the Expected hours per day or Expected days per week in the header for each project if you have a separate schedule for each of the projects.

If you know at the beginning of a project when it will start and when it must be finished, make sure you fill in those values. Then when you’re creating your initial estimates for the tasks you can see immediately if you’re likely to fall within the deadline, or blow it out. As you progress you can keep an eye on the finish dates to see how you’re going.

If you can see that you’re blowing out the timelines during the project a number of solutions present themselves. You can work more hours in the day to make up for lost time, or decrease the time you allow yourself for later tasks. You can ask the client if it’s possible to push back the deadline, or ask if there are features that are less important to the project that you can then allocate less time to.

The important thing is that you are able to detect the problem early in the process, making it much easier to work out, rather than realising the day before the project is due that you’re not going to make it, putting you and your client in a difficult position.

 

Part 3 – Conclusion

The more you use a schedule, the better you will become at estimating how long things will take you. To begin with your initial estimates and actual times may vary considerably, they usually do. But as you do more projects and refer to past schedules you will soon find that your initial estimates become closer and closer to the actual time taken.

You can also use the principles of this schedule to take the idea much further. If you have read my earlier article on setting an hourly rate you will be able to quote for a project more easily knowing how long you expect the project to take, and what your hourly rate is. Just multiply the number of hours by your hourly rate and you have the total amount the project is worth. I have also expanded on it to schedule team projects, with each different element of the project scheduled together.

Before you know it you will wonder how you ever did without scheduling. You will feel more organised and better prepared to handle mishaps. When unexpected problems arise you will be able to deal with them calmly and with detailed knowledge of how they affect the big picture. You will have a record of your progress and how you’ve improved your production speed. But more than anything else you will feel confident quoting times for jobs knowing that your quote is based on actual experience, not just a guesstimate.

Remember, spending just 5 minutes a day on your schedule will end up saving you days, even weeks, in the long run.

Research

The very first thing to do is to research as much as you can. One of the best places too look up is IT recruiting agencies. Often they will publish average or expected pay rates for different types of jobs. If you are lucky you will find not only salary rates, but hourly rates as well. Also look at job advertisements, for work similar to what you are doing, to see how much they are offering.

Network with as many people as possible doing your kind of work, even in vaguely related industries. Quite often they’ll be open about their standard rates, and it’ll give you a better idea of the market in your area.

Budget

As a freelancer you are basically running your own business. This means you need to consider things like phone and internet costs, electricity, rent, and most importantly both hardware and software upgrades. Once you have factored these into a budget you need to look at your personal items such as loans, food, entertainment, hobbies, toys (or ‘reference’ as I like to call them) etc.

You need to prepare as detailed a budget as you can, for at least a 12 month period. This will allow you to include the major hardware and software upgrades, which you should budget for once a year. Don’t forget to allow for income tax. Usually at this stage adding 25% to the bottom line is sufficient.

Don’t undervalue yourself

Now you’ve done the research, and prepared your budget, Let’s do some preliminary calculations to get things started. Have a look at the budget, and your total costs for the 12 month period. Now you need to decide how much you want to work. For now let’s assume a normal working week of 40 hours and 46 working weeks a year (Giving yourself 4 weeks break plus 2 weeks emergency/sick time per year).

Divide your total costs by 46 (the number of weeks) and then divide that figure by 40 (the number of hours per week). The figure that is left is your average hourly cost. (If it seems excessively high you may want to leave that 150” Sony plasma TV off the budget for now)

Before we continue, let’s think about the figures we’ve used. 46 weeks work a year is certainly good to aim for, but how likely is it that you will find that much work? Certainly in my experience the ratio of paid work to self-promotion, looking for and generating work opportunities is usually starts at around 1:2. Unless you’re really lucky the best it will probably be for a while is 1:1. What this tells us is that out of those 46 weeks you are planning to work, you are likely to only be paid for 15 to 23 of those weeks.

You may be asking why the ratio is so low when many production companies usually have a much better ratio. Well the reason is simple. Companies are in a position of having people dedicated to promotion and work generation, while others in the company are doing the work. On the other hand you have only yourself to do both tasks. When the pressure is on to complete work by a deadline you rarely get the opportunities to get out and network to promote yourself. Of course as time goes on and more people are aware of you, and you have more jobs under your belt the ratio should rise, hopefully to the point you have to turn down work, or sub-contract because you’re too busy.

So getting back to our sums, let’s do that last one again, this time using 15 paid working weeks, and again 40 hours per week. Quite a difference isn’t it?

Now this exercise has given us a good understanding of just how much it costs to be in this business, but there’s still a little way to go before we have our actual hourly rates figured out.

 

Step 2 – Calculate your rate

Now that you’ve done some preparation and worked out your costs, it’s time to work out your asking price. There are 2 figures that you need to arrive at. One is your optimum rate, the amount you believe you are worth, and that you should usually quote. The other is your cut-off rate, the lowest amount for which you can work and still comfortably pay the bills. We can use what we’ve already done to calculate both those figures.

You’ve already estimated how many paid hours you are likely to work and arrived at a figure that is your average hourly cost but we need to factor in some more things before it can be used effectively.

Profit

A business only exists to make profit. Sure, it’s nice to think that it’s providing valuable services, and is a fun place to work, but at the end of the day the profit margin is all important.

It’s easy to forget this principle in our line of work, because more often than not we are made to feel guilty for getting paid to have fun. At least that’s the limited impression of many people outside our industry who rarely factor in the often outrageous working hours and pressures involved. So since we’ve already established that as a freelancer you are running your own business, you need to think about profit.

How much to add? The most accepted figure to aim for in the business world is 30%. A successful business is earning at least 30% profit. Of course this has been re-written in recent years by many IT companies who earn significantly more profit, but let’s keep our initial expectations to the accepted 30%.

Without profit, you will find it very difficult to advance your freelance career. Consider these points:

• If you’re working from job to job just to put food on the table, are you spending enough time planning for the future?
• What happens when a job comes up that requires you to purchase an unexpected piece of equipment?
• What about training? In our business we need to spend significant amounts of time learning new features and programs.
• What happens when a client doesn’t pay on time, or at all?

Salary vs Hourly Rate

Now it’s likely that most of your research resulted in some knowledge of salary rates, but very little in the way of hourly rates. If we want to compare our figures to salaries, we need to break down those salaries.

Take a salary of $50,000 for example. What hourly rate is the company paying? Easy you say…

$50,000 / 1840 (46 weeks x 40 hrs/week) = $27 per hour.

But no, it’s not that easy. When a company hires an employee, it doesn’t only cost them the salary. Other costs include superannuation, workers comp, non-productive time, leave, overheads (coffee, toilet paper etc), just to name a few. When all these are added up they come to roughly 50% of the salary. But that’s not all, there’s also equipment costs and furniture, which are large initial expenses as well as ongoing ones. You’re looking at roughly $10-12,000 to setup an employee, plus yearly hardware and software upgrades. So you can easily add an additional 30%. Those add up to a whopping 80% of the salary.

So let’s look at that salary figure again… $50,000 x 1.8 = $90,000. To hire an employee at $50,000 costs the company $90,000. Surprising isn’t it? So re-evaluating the hourly rate we get $90,000 / 1840 = $56 per hour. The employee is receiving $27 per hour, but it’s costing the company $49 per hour. In other words, to pay the employee $27 per hour the company needs to charge the employees time out at $49 per hour.

So if you do this calculation on all the salary rates you have found in your research, you’ll have a good basis for comparison:

 

Salary x 1.8 / 1840 = Hourly rate

 

So let’s take your average hourly costs and add a percentage for profit. We’re getting very close to an appropriate hourly rate now.

Let’s compare this hourly rate to the hourly rates from your research. If the figure lies within the limits of your research then you’re probably on track. If your rates are significantly higher or lower than these rates then you may need to go back and look at your calculations again. Analyze your budget, profit margin and paid weeks estimate to see what areas you can massage in order to arrive at a reasonable hourly rate.

Optimum vs cut-off

So what’s the difference between the optimum rate, and the cut-off rate?

The optimum rate is the amount that falls within the industry standards, covers your costs, covers your unpaid time, and includes some profit. This amount (or a little higher) is what you would normally start with when preparing a quote, in the knowledge that it’s likely to go down a bit through negotiations.

The cut-off rate is the lowest amount that you can afford to work for. If negotiations fall below this amount you walk away from the bid. You may decide that your cut-off rate doesn’t have any profit included, or maybe it’s for longer term work so your paid weeks estimate may be higher. But under no circumstances can you accept lower than this amount. If you do then you will go into debt in order to do the work. You might as well pay the client for the privilege of doing the work.

Once you know these amounts, quoting suddenly becomes a piece of cake. No longer do you have to agonise over how much you think the client can pay, because you know how much you need to do the work.

The other decision you have to make is how flexible you want to be with your rate, how willing you are to negotiate. You may decide that you will nominate a percentage that you will easily negotiate down, after which you become less flexible.

GST

The dreaded tax man will take more than just income tax. Because you are working for yourself you are considered a business by the tax department. This means that you will be responsible for charging and paying GST for your services. If you haven’t already, you should apply for an ABN number, and you will need to fill out a BAS statement each quarter. You should have a few deductions, but basically you will need to pay 10% of your earnings to the tax man.

So whatever you’ve calculated your hourly rate to be, the last step before you quote is to add 10% for GST. If you don’t, then the GST will eat into your costs.

 

Step 3 – Putting it into practice

The most prominent factor when quoting is the value of the work to the customer, or the perceived value, versus what it costs you to deliver the work, the cost of services. Somewhere between these 2 amounts is the amount you and the client will end up agreeing upon for your hourly rate.

So how do you figure out the perceived value?

You should find out as much about the client as possible.

• What kind of work have they done before?
• What clients have they worked with?
• How long have they been in business?
• What impression do others have of the company?
• Does the company already have the project, or are they bidding for it while looking at who might be available?
• Where is the company based?
• Where does the project originate?

Once you have done this you should have a fairly good idea of what position the company is in, whether they will be looking for cheap labour, or are willing to pay for high quality work.

One mistake that many people make when they’re starting out is feeling intimidated by the negotiation process. It’s easy to do, but keep in mind that the client needs you as much as you need them. Be strong and the client will respect you for it. The client may even tell you that they can’t afford your rate just to see how low you are willing to go. Often a client will appear to walk away, before reconsidering and agreeing to your rates. This can be a test to weed out who’s serious and who’s not. The ones who are prepared to negotiate down to nothing are usually not going to provide quality work.

Along the way you may miss out on a few jobs because your rates are too high, that’s normal. Those jobs probably wouldn’t be worth putting on your portfolio anyway. Of course if you haven’t eaten for a few weeks you can always make an exception. But remember, if you accept a job for too low a rate, you may be missing out on a much more attractive offer just around the
corner because you’re too busy.

Other variables

There are some other factors we need to consider when comparing rates or preparing quotes.

Acceptable hourly rates can differ from state to state and country to country. Don’t panic, this doesn’t mean that if you live in South Australia you will be poor. It means that you may need to adjust your hourly rate up or down depending on where the work is coming from. Take note of where your researched salaries and rates are from to get a feel for the marketplace value in different locations.

Keep an eye on the industry to see where the highest demand is. The higher the demand and lower number of people skilled to fill that demand drive the rates up for that type of work. For example there is currently a glut of web designers in Australia, but there’s been a downturn in the demand for web designers. This means that the rates for web design work are potentially lower than over the last couple of years.

So in considering different rates for different skills, you should break down your skills into different areas, such as 3d graphics, 3d animation, 2d graphics (Photoshop), 2d animation (Flash), traditional illustration, web design, etc. Each of these can demand different hourly rates depending on the level of skill involved versus the number of people with those skills.

Your rate will also depend on your abilities within an area. The better you are the more you can charge. Although the industry may determine that 3d character animation is worth more than 2d graphics, if you’re better at 2d graphics your rates should represent that.

Your level of experience, and the number of satisfied clients will affect your rates. If a client can see that you’ve worked successfully with other clients they are more likely to agree to your rates. Also if the job involves team work, having worked with others on projects will greatly enhance your chances.

Also related to experience is speed. The faster you are at doing something the more you can charge per hour. This can be a difficult one with a new client, but as you do more work for a particular client this can become a bargaining point.

A big factor to consider is the length of the project or job. The longer a project is, the more flexible you can be with your rate. Remember we were estimating a fairly low number of paid working weeks. If a job comes along that is measured in months rather than weeks your estimated paid weeks figure suddenly jumps up which means that you can quote less while still maintaining the same level of finances.

Sometimes you are offered a job that is too much fun to pass up, or will help enhance your skills in a particular area, but the money isn’t great. If you’ve got enough money that you can afford to do the job for less than your normal rates, or even less than your cut-off rates, it can be worthwhile for the experience or just plain fun.

Conclusion

A few years ago I was talking with some contemporaries about hourly rates. I suggested to them that they could look at increasing their rates, as their rates were well below industry standards. At the time I had just adjusted my own rates up. When I told them what rates I thought they could be receiving and told them my new rates, they laughed at me and said I was nuts.

A few weeks later I had a 3 month job at my new rates, and those contemporaries were still working insane hours just to cover the rent.

If you put the time into determining your hourly rate, and understanding what factors influence that rate you will make your life much easier. There will always be exceptions to the rule, but as always, the more you know the rules of the game, the better decisions you can make when bending those rules.

The reason for making the smash cake first, is that we’ll put it in place as the fur icing is being done. It’s quite a tight fit, and would be too easy to scrape and stuff up the fur if you put it on afterwards.

So grab the mini cake board (which can be prepared by covering with wrapping paper, contact or just foil) put down a generous dollup of icing and put the cakes on, giving them a filling/crumb coat layer, and put them in the freezer for 1/2 hour or more to set the crumb coat. Then go ahead and decorate just like you would with any other cake.

Before decorating it may be worth pushing the cake down on the dowel, or you may want to wait until later. If you do it first then when you put the finished cake in place you won’t disturb the icing too much, but it’ll still be frozen, so you could split it. If you wait till later the dowel will more easily go through the cake, but you’ll need to push down quite hard putting a hole in the icing (which can be covered up by a candle, or more icing, or another decoration). If your cake is sitting flat instead of on an angle like mine, then you can just dig a hole through the center with a knife. I waited and pushed the cake onto the dowel after decorating, then fixed the hole.

 

Preparing for the Fur

If you’ve made the icing a few days in advance, you’ll be glad to have the space back in your fridge. Take out the icing a couple of hours before you plan to start to give it time to thaw. It will be quite solid, especially if you’ve made if from copha/shortening. While it’s thawing we can prepare the cake.

Arms and Legs

The arms and legs should be set nicely by now. If you need to you can carve or shave the legs and feet if there are any bits sticking out, or too bulky. Test each arm in place and make any adjustments necessary. Thin the shoulders so they merge nicely with the body at the top, and make sure the arms/hands will fit under the smash cake. When any adjustments have been made, press each arm into the body, bending slightly if necessary, until it sticks in place. The arms may also rest on the legs a bit, giving them extra support.

It’s up to you whether you do this or not, but I quickly covered the arms and legs with a layer of my crumb coat icing, just so that if there ended up any small gaps in the fur that the light colored rice crispies wouldn’t shine through.

Elmo’s Mouth

I mentioned in the beginning that you could buy or make fondant for the inside of Elmo’s mouth. You can buy chocolate fondant from most supermarkets, which you can leave as is, or color black. Because it’s already dark brown it won’t need much coloring. I had some chocolate fondant I’d made for the Lion’s mane left over, so I used that, and didn’t bother coloring it black.

I also wanted to mention an alternative to using fondant for the mouth. You could quite easily use butter cream icing instead of fondant. If you have some black coloring gel, you can make some rich chocolate butter cream icing, and darken it with black coloring. Since the cake will still be frozen at this point, the icing will set very quickly, making it easier to get a nice smooth surface without having wait for it to crust.

Whichever method you choose, make sure you cover the mouth before starting the fur, as the fur will cover the edge of the fondant or icing. If making it out of fondant, you’ll need to roll out a circle big enough to cover the inside of the mouth. Bend it in half and place the bent edge at the back of the mouth. Lift the top half and press into the top of the mouth, and smooth the bottom half over the bottom of the mouth. Cut the fondant along the edges of the mouth, starting with the top edge. Push the fondant into the crease at the back of the mouth, making sure the fondant is nice and tight on the cake.

 

Piping the Fur

When planning the fur, I was torn between using a star or a grass tip for piping the icing. The star tip would create what looks like clumps of fur that I thought would look quite good. On the other hand, the grass tip would create fine strands that might look more like fur, but perhaps less of a clumped look. I had hoped to experiment a bit, but as I was running short on time I went with the star, thinking that would be the quicker option.

A couple of warnings before we get started. Piping fur is very, very repetitive, and tedious, and time consuming. You’ll likely get tired hands and wrists, possibly cramping a bit by the end. Make sure you leave enough time to do it without staying up all night. You’ll need some music, tv or something equally distracting so you don’t get bored to bits. You’ll also end up with very red hands and fingers from the red coloring, so you may want to use gloves, but as long as you’re doing it the day before the party there’ll be plenty of time to wash it off before the event.

When piping the fur you need to start at the bottom and work up. This way each layer of fur overlays the previous layer/s as it should. Also don’t make the fur strands or clumps too regular. Mix up the lines as you go, start each one a bit higher or lower, and make each one go in a slightly different direction. The more variation you can get in there, the more natural the fur will look. Take your time with each stroke, making sure to finish each one before moving up for the next. If you try and do it too quickly (which I almost guarantee you will a few times towards the end, when you just can’t wait to be finished) it will end up a mess and not look at all like fur. Even doing each stroke carefully, you’ll work up a rhythm and be much faster towards the end than you started.

One more note on the color. I found that as the icing warmed, the color deepened. This meant that icing that I’d piped on, that had run through the warmth of my hands, was a deeper red than icing that I spread on with a spatula. It also meant that the earlier parts of the fur were a bit lighter in color than the later parts. It’s something to watch out for each time you need to fill up the piping bag as well, as the first few strokes will be lighter in color. Perhaps there’s a way to warm the icing consistently to get the color the same all through, I’m not sure. I ended up doing the first few strokes of each new bag on the back, so the front stayed fairly consistent in color.

When the fur has thawed a bit (I left mine in the sun for an hour or so), get out your beaters and whip it up again. When it’s back close to its original consistency you can put some in a piping bag and get ready to start.

Start by piping some icing in the areas that will end up under the smash cake, the lower part of the tummy, the hands and the inside of the legs. I just piped it in roughly and spread it with a knife, as it’ll be mostly covered with the smash cake so doesn’t need the fur texture. Any parts I did this for, I kept the surface quite rough, so what was visible didn’t look too different to the proper fur. When those areas are covered, take your decorated smash cake and push it down onto the dowel and into position.

Now you can start on the fur, being careful to avoid the smash cake when you’re near it. I recommend starting at the front and working your way to the back (just in case you start to run low on icing towards the end as I did), remembering to always work from the bottom up. You can do it in sections created naturally by the forms of the character. The tummy up to the bottom of the mouth can be done separately, the arms and legs can be done separately. Any parts that are tricky to get to with the piping nozzle, like the underside of the legs, can be spread roughly with a spatula or knife.

As you go, keep in mind which way the fur would naturally flow, working up stream so to speak. So work from the bottom of arms to the top, from the feet up the legs to the body, etc. It’s useful to find a few photos of Elmo to see how his actual fur flows. You’ll see it’s usually combed to the sides above his mouth which will affect how you do the icing there.

 

Final Touches

When you’ve finally finished piping the fur, with your hands still aching, fumble about for the eyes and nose you made earlier. Trying to keep your hands from shaking too much, push the eyes and nose gently, but firmly into position on the top of the head. Check my plan for the proper positioning, as correct placement of the eyes and nose makes a big difference in how much the final cake looks like Elmo.

Finally, position the blocks and toys in front of the smash cake, hiding the supports.

 

Alternative Techniques

As I mentioned a few times there are always alternative ways to do things, some are easier, others are just, well, different. There’s no right or wrong way to do any of this, you just do whatever suits your particular cake design and other requirements.

Smaller Elmo

You may want to make a smaller Elmo, possibly even sitting on another cake. If your Elmo is smaller than this one, your stand may not need to be quite so sturdy or complex. If the cake he’s sitting on is tall enough, you may not even need to secure the dowels to the board. Pushing the dowels down into the lower cake may provide enough support. Just make sure you use supports under Elmo so he doesn’t fall into the underlying cake.

If you wanted a small Elmo on another cake you could make him entirely out of rice crispies. Indeed someone else has provided instructions for one way of doing this at Cakes Canada

Arms and Legs

I mentioned when talking about the stand, that you could do away with the wire support by placing the legs flat on the board instead of having the knees raised, or if you’re making a smaller Elmo sitting on another cake. You could just mold the rice crispies straight on the board or a bench, and move them into position when you start icing. You don’t even have to use rice crispies for the arms and legs at all.

You could make them out of cake, and skewer the arms in place. You could make them out of fondant if you have enough, or if your Elmo is smaller than mine. If your Elmo is small enough you could even make the insides and outsides of the arms and legs out of butter cream icing. If you really wanted you could even use polystyrene.

Head

Instead of cake, if you didn’t need to serve too many people, or if you choose to have your Elmo sitting on another cake, you could make the head out of rice crispies (or polystyrene). That would mean you wouldn’t need the support disk in the middle to hold the mouth up.

Smash Cake

Instead of including a dowel to hold up the smash cake board, you could hold it up with more cake, or a block of polystyrene, or a block of wood. Since it’s pretty well hidden you could use almost anything. If I were making an Elmo sitting on another cake, I’d probably hold it up with cake, and the icing would stop it slipping.

 

As you can see there are many different ways to accomplish the same thing, and many different things you can do. My aim with this tutorial has been not just to show you how I made Elmo, but to explain some of the techniques I’ve used when making cakes like this. I hope that this will give you the confidence and knowledge to make all sorts of different 3D cakes, not just Elmo. The only limit is our imagination.

 

If you’d like to see more of my cakes or tutorials, as well as what I have on my blog, I have posted some photo tutorials on Flickr.

If you’ve been inspired by this tutorial I’d love to hear from you, and would love to see any cakes made as a result. As always, if you have any comments or questions please feel free to leave them below.

Rice crispies are much cheaper than cake. Again, if you have a cake structure that’s bigger than the number of servings needed, you can save on the weight and the cost of ingredients by using rice crispies.

Rice crispies can be molded into all sorts of shapes, wrapped around armatures, and are generally more versatile than cake. Once set they can be carved to shape them even more. Lastly, they are quite strong when set, quite a bit stronger than cake as a rule.

There are alternatives to rice crispies. Polystyrene is often used instead of cake or rice crispies, hidden under the icing of a 3D cake. Personally I prefer to use rice crispies instead of polystyrene as I like to make as much of my cakes edible as possible, more out of principle than for any other reason. It adds to the challenge. I have used polystyrene before though, as a base for the Lion King cake, where it would have been impractical using rice crispies.

Before making the rice crispies, make sure you have the plans or measurements for what you’re going to make with them. The images on the right are the plans I made for the present, blocks, eyes and nose and arms. Like the others, these are made to fit an A4 page, so print them at that size to get the right measurements.

So let’s get to it. We’ll do all the parts we need the cake for first, so we can get the cake back into the freezer before it thaws too much. Make a batch of rice crispies, and as they’re cooling, grab the cake from the freezer to get it ready for the rice crispies. Start by wrapping the coat hanger wire (previously bent into shape and plugged into the board) with aluminium foil. This helps the rice crispies attach better and keeps everything hygienic. It shouldn’t be too smooth, in fact the rougher it is the better. But make sure it’s nice and tight. The rice crispies will be sticking to the foil, so the foil needs to stick to the wire or it may start to fall apart.

Grab a spoonful of rice crispies and mold it into a ball in your hands. If it’s very sticky on your hands or fingers, you can wipe a little butter on your fingers to stop it sticking. Push the ball of rice crispies onto the armature at the base of one of Elmo’s feet. Add another ball of rice crispies until you’ve built up the whole foot. Compact it tight with your hands, as tight as you can make it. This might reduce the size of the foot so you may need to add some more rice crispies. Once you’ve done the foot, start with the leg. Pack balls of rice crispies around the wire from the foot, working your way up to the knee. When you’re near the knee, start packing rice crispies around where the wire and body join. You’ll find the rice crispies should set fairly quickly there, as the cold from the cake freezes them a little. Again, work your way up to the knee and join onto the rice crispies already there, remembering to pack tight as you go. Keep in mind the leg shouldn’t be very thick so don’t put too much rice crispies around it. Around 4cm thick is about right. Thinner than that and there won’t be enough rice crispies to hold. Thicker than that and the legs will be too fat. But you don’t have to be too precise with your molding, especially for the feet. Remember you’ll be covering the whole lot with icing later. Repeat the process for the other leg.

Now that’s done we’ll do the arms. Mold a sausage of rice crispies, and using the template bend it into the right shape. Don’t worry about including the thumb, I realized after making the template that the thumb would get in the way of removing the smash cake. Also don’t worry too much about the hand, as that part will end up hidden under the smash cake. Make another sausage and bend the other way, making a mirror image of the first arm. The arms need to be as compacted as possible, so really squeeze them tight.

As you’re making the arms, keep checking the legs, that the rice crispies aren’t falling off, especially on the underside of the legs. Squeeze them back on if they come loose. When they’re finished, place the arms on the cake board and place the cake board back in the freezer. Freezing the rice crispies for a couple of hours, or overnight, helps them set. I’ve found leaving them too long (like 5 weeks) can have the opposite effect though, just something to keep in mind.

With the arms and legs safely away, we can make the eyes and nose. Looking at the template images, the eye and nose are their final size, so when making the rice crispies for them you’ll need to make them a bit smaller to allow for the fondant. Roll two balls for the eyes, and one oval shaped ball for the nose. Put them in the freezer to set along with the rest.

If at any time you run out of rice crispies, you can just make another batch, making sure you wash out the bowl first.

 

Blocks, Toys and Fondant

Now if you wanted to make some of the blocks or toys from rice crispies, you could go ahead and make them now with the left overs. The very inside square of the present and block images is the size the cake or rice crispies core should be. You can see a rice crispies block in the pic to the right, compared to the blocks with the first, white fondant layer (the yellow block is an earlier practice one I made), and a finished block in the pic below. With a few cake or rice crispies cores made, freeze them for as long as necessary to make them nice and firm.

If making the blocks out of cake, give each a crumb coat of icing before putting in the freezer. This will help the fondant to stick, and give the cake some added flavour. If you’re making the blocks out of rice crispies you don’t need to give them a crumb coat, as fondant sticks well to plain rice crispies.

To make the blocks there are three layers. The core made of cake or rice crispies, a white layer of fondant, then a colored layer of fondant for the edges and features of the block. My original plan was to write Happy Birthday on a tag attached to the present, with the birthday boy’s name spelled out on the blocks. These would be arranged in the front, so would have the added benefit of hiding the cake stand under the smash cake maintaining the illusion that Elmo is holding it.

When the cores are frozen, open the fondant and roll some out to about 1/2cm thick. Place a block on the fondant and cut around the base, so the block is sitting on a square of fondant the same size as one of its sides. Turn the block upside down and repeat. Now you should have the core sandwiched by two pieces of fondant. Turn the block on its side (with the fondant attached), place it on the fondant, and mark the fondant along the front and sides of the block. Cut a strip of fondant the width of the block following the line of each side cut. Roll the block along the fondant strip, lifting the fondant with it, and smoothing each side as you go. Cut the fondant where it meets the first edge. You should now have a completely covered block like the ones in the image above. With a fondant smoother, or something else flat, press each side so the block is smooth, flat and square. Repeat for all the other blocks. (This is a bit tricky to describe without pictures. I’ll take some video or pics of the process and include them here when I get a chance.)

It’s useful to let these blocks sit for a while to harden, overnight if possible. The firmer they are, the more square the final blocks will be. If they’re too soft then the final blocks will be in danger of having very rounded corners and edges.

Eyes and Nose

While the blocks are setting we can move onto the eyes and nose. Now covering balls with fondant is tricky at the best of times. What I’m about to describe here is the best way I’ve come up with for covering small balls with fondant, there may well be other methods I’m unaware of. What I have seen is that for balls of this size it’s usually suggested to just roll a ball of fondant. The reason I didn’t want to do that here is that even though the top of the mouth is supported, too much weight on top will still cause it to droop or fall completely. Since a solid ball of fondant is much heavier than one made with rice crispies, I chose the more difficult option of covering a rice crispies ball with fondant.

The way I cover a small ball with fondant is to roll out enough fondant to cover the ball, leaving it about twice or even three times as thick as it’ll end up being. The final fondant cover should still be thicker than average though, I’d say around 3/4cm (a bit over 1/4″) thick. Pick up the fondant and work it into a cup shape. Place the rice crispies ball into the cup of fondant and gently close the hole around the ball, working out the wrinkles as much as possible. When you’ve closed the hole completely over you’ll have a lumpy ball. Now the magic. Make sure your table or surface is completely clean. Roll the ball between your hand and the table using big motions so you cover the whole ball. Roll the ball back and forth, especially over the top and sides, making them as smooth as possible. Keep rolling until you have a very smooth ball with a few barely visible creases towards the bottom, and an only slightly more visible seam where the hole closed over. That’s ok, because that is the part that’ll sit on the cake hidden from view. Repeat for the other eye.

Now take a little more fondant that used for each eye and color it orange for the nose. Once it’s colored and kneaded well through, repeat the ball process for the nose, keeping in mind that the top and front of the nose are most important to keep smooth and unblemished. The back and base of the nose will be hidden.

Back to the Blocks

My goal for the blocks was to avoid being able to see any seams. I wanted the blocks to, well, look like real blocks. To accomplish this, I really only needed to cover three sides of the block with a single piece of fondant, as you can only ever see three sides of a block from any one angle. I knew I’d be able to arrange the blocks so the best sides were facing out. Two of the blocks would have a single letter of the birthday boy’s name, and two would each have two letters as shown in the pic. The remaining sides would have random letters, pictures and numbers on them.

So we need to color enough fondant to cover a block (or more if you want more than one of each color). Then roll it out about 1/4cm (1/8″) thick. Position one of the blocks with a corner facing you and lay the fondant over the block, covering three sides. Smooth the fondant on each side, making the edges and corner as sharp as possible. At the edges, cut the fondant flush with the sides of the white fondant block. Now turn the block over so the remaining three sides are facing you. Repeat the process, only at the end, cut the edges of the fondant flush with the previously laid color layer. Lift up each edge and wet along it with a brush or toothpick. Lay the edges back down and smooth over to seal the edge. With the right corner facing you, you shouldn’t be able to see any seams.

With a sharp knife, cut out a square from each side that will be visible on the final cake, being careful not to cut into the white fondant layer. Cut each square into a letter, number or shape and, by wetting the back just a little, stick back on the block.

That’s about it really. Leave the fondant covered eyes, nose and blocks in a cool, dry place to firm up, preferably overnight. If you want to make a ball toy or two, you can follow the same method as the eyes and nose, or you could do two halves different colors. The present is just a box with strips of fondant for the ribbon, and I’d originally planned a bow that I didn’t get to. I also had meant to cut the bottom off the present I made, to make it shorter, and get rid of the wrinkles, only in my haste I didn’t get around to it.

 

Next one should be the final installment, where I’ll get onto the final fur icing and finishing touches.

As always, if you have any comments or questions please feel free to leave them below and I’ll answer them directly or in the next installment.

 

Continue to How I Made an Elmo Cake… Part 4, the Conclusion…

Although the pudding tins are smaller in diameter, they’re deeper so they tend to use about the same amount of cake mix as a 20cm cake, and the pyrex bowl uses about 2/3 of a mixture. So I ended up making 5 batches. The left over batter from the pyrex bowl was enough for the 9cm cakes.

If you don’t have a small pyrex bowl you could also use a Dolly Varden tin, or another pudding tin if you carve the top of the resulting cake so it’s rounded. If you don’t have a pudding tin, or 15cm cake tin, you could also use 20cm cakes and carve them into shape. You would need 4 x 20cm cakes to make up the height of the body, and 3 for the head, so you’d end up needing at least 7 batches. So you can see using shaped tins not only means less work in carving, but less wasted cake (Not that the cake is ever wasted, between taste testing and cake balls) and less money spent on ingredients.

I had some leftover cake that I used to make the present and blocks, but if you want to make them out of cake (you can also make them out of rice crispies) you’ll need to make enough cake for those too. When we get into the blocks in detail I’ll give you the dimensions and some idea of how much cake you’ll need for those.

Once the cakes are baked and cooled, we’ll freeze them before carving. But first (after making sure they’re well cooled) cut the domed tops off them (called leveling), and put aside one of the pudding (15cm) cakes. Now here’s the tricky bit. I like to make a hole for the dowel, before the cakes are frozen, with a thin knife (a steak knife works well). It’s much easier to make the hole in freshly made cake than frozen cake. The tricky part of this is knowing where to put the hole. For the head it’s pretty straight forward, right in the middle. For the body it’s a bit trickier. Work it out from the plans where the dowel goes in the bottom and where it comes out the top, sometimes at an angle. From there make a hole in the bottom roughly heading towards the right place, and then a hole at the top heading towards the hole at the bottom. From there push the knife through each side until it comes through the hole in the other side. It doesn’t have to be a very wide hole, just enough that you can push the dowel through when the cake is frozen.

Once all the holes are in place, cut the thicker cakes into 2 or 3 layers (called torting). Take the pudding cake that was put aside and cut it into thirds. Put a hole through the middle of the two outer layers, and towards one edge of the middle layer (using the other pudding cake as a guide for the position of the hole). If the cake is firm enough, you can cut this middle layer into a wedge now, otherwise it might be easier to do it when it’s frozen.

Once all that’s done, double wrap each cake in plastic wrap and put them in the freezer for a few hours, or overnight.

Planning Your Time

Speaking of which, I just realized I forgot to mention in the planning stage about planning your time. Making these cakes isn’t a quick process, and you need to allow yourself enough time to make the cake, but not so much time that the finished cake is sitting around for too long before the party.

Now I don’t know how professional cake decorators do it, I’m sure being able to make all the cakes at once, having lots of fridge and freezer space and large quantities of icing makes the process much quicker and easier. I don’t have big enough bowls, enough cake pans or enough space in my oven to make all the cakes at the same time, and invariably need to re-arrange everything in the freezer just to squeeze cakes in. So here’s a plan I would use for this cake:

Day 1
• Make the stand
• Make fur icing

Day 2

• Make cakes
• Make fondant

Day 3

• Make crumb coat icing
• Carve cake
• Crumb coat
• Rice crispies
• Make eyes, nose, and start on blocks

Day 4

• Decorate smash cake
• Fur icing
• Put eyes and nose on
• Finish blocks and toys

Day 5

• Party!!

This ensures that the actual cake stays frozen as long as possible throughout the process, and is thawed as close to the day of the party as possible. In this case only one day before, at which point it’s well sealed by the icing and will stay nice and fresh.

I usually make the butter cream icing the day of carving the cake, but in this case it’s worth making a few days before making the stand to let the color set in.

 

Carving the Cake

Ooh it’s exciting. This is one of the most fun parts of making these cakes. It’s also one of the most stressful, as you can so easily go wrong. I always have in the back of my mind that I may need to make the cakes all over again if I stuff it up and that’s where the stress comes from because as you can see from my timeline above, I rarely leave enough time to start again (without losing massive amounts of sleep).

So we need to start by making a few batches of icing to fill the cakes and provide the crumb coat. When icing a cake, it’s always a good idea to give it a crumb coat. A crumb coat serves a number of purposes. Firstly as it’s name suggests, it traps the crumbs so that if your covering the cake in butter cream icing, you don’t get crumbs all through it. For carved cakes, it seals the cake for when it’s put back in the freezer, so you don’t need to wrap it again to retain the moisture, and it also lets you smooth the surface of the cake, forgiving errors in your carving and building up areas that need it. For fondant covered cakes, it gives the fondant something to stick to so the fondant adheres to the cake well and doesn’t just slide off, and smooths the surface of the cake so you don’t have lumpy fondant.

Thanks to Bakerella I’ve just recently discovered cream cheese frosting/icing, which tastes just like cheese cake, and is delicious with chocolate cake. I’d recommend cream cheese icing to fill between each layer of cake, just because it’s so yummy. I would make chocolate icing for the crumb coat, maybe with some red coloring. The reason for this, other than it tastes nice, is that a darker crumb coat or undercoat is preferable so that any gaps in the fur coat look ok. If a lighter color was underneath, gaps would be very obvious and look a bit strange.

The great thing about the filling and crumb coat is you don’t have to make too much icing to start with, as if you underestimate, you can just make more. It’s not always as easy to do this with the top coat, especially because of color matching.

So you’ve got some icing ready, and your stand on the bench. It’s crunch time. Grab the cakes from the freezer. If you’ve got the disk and thinner dowel on the main dowel, take them and the wire off and place a small piece of plastic wrap over the top of the dowel, protecting the hole from crumbs.

Unwrap the pudding cake and push each layer down over the dowel, using the pre-made hole in the cakes as a guide for positioning. Put a nice thick layer of filling over the top of each layer before putting the next layer on.

If you have already cut the middle pudding layer into a wedge, push this down over the dowel. Otherwise cut the wedge out and then push it down. Put a layer of filling on and then push the pyrex bowl layers over the dowel, making sure to sandwich a nice thick layer of filling between every layer. The top of the cake at this stage should be roughly level with the top of the dowel. If it’s a bit higher you can push down the layers a bit, or cut a bit off the top. If it’s a bit lower that’s ok too, you can build it up a bit with icing.

Now you can do some cutting. Carve the wedge to follow the contours established by the other cakes. You can then smooth all the edges so there’s a nice smooth transition between all the layers. There may be some gaps in the edges between the layers, but that’s ok, they’ll be filled with icing in a minute. Now grab a spatula or butter knife and start spreading the crumb coat icing over the surface. Fill in the gaps between cakes and make sure there’s a nice smooth surface over the whole thing. You’ll notice that, because the cakes are frozen, the icing hardens almost as soon as you put it on. This makes it even easier to get a smooth surface. It doesn’t have to be super smooth, just with the major gaps filled really, and a nice thin coating of icing over the whole thing.

Now take the plastic wrap off the dowel and put the wire, disk and thinner dowel on ready to support the head.

Put on the bottom layer of the pudding, cover with filling, then place on one of the 20cm cakes. Put a thin layer of filling on top then place on the large disk (You could make this out of cardboard, but because there’s a fairly large amount of cake being suspended I chose to use MDF just to be sure.) Another layer of filling on the disk and then the other 20cm cake, filling and finally the last layer of pudding cake.

Start carving the head into a spherical shape. Once that’s done, give the head a crumb coat taking extra care with the top back and sides.

To make the mouth, start at the top edge of the bottom layer of the head, cut upwards, making a wedge in the front up to the disk in the middle. Start smaller than you need, because you can always cut more away. If the mouth is too small, cut more, perhaps starting a bit lower if you want a more open mouth, or just deeper for a wider mouth. Once that’s done, crumb coat the inside of the mouth, making sure the disk is hidden and smoothed by icing.

And that’s the carving done. Looking at the cake as a whole, if you need to cut any more away, or build any areas up with icing, you can do it now. Check that the mini cake board for the smash cake fits over the front dowel. If the tummy gets in the way you can cut a bit more away there until the mini cake board goes on easily. Finally put the whole thing in the freezer to freeze back up before we add the rice crispies.

If you don’t have a freezer big enough to hold the cake board with the stacked cake on it, then you may need to arrange your time a little differently. I’ll talk more about that at the end.

 

I’m afraid that’s all I have time for in this installment. We’ll get onto the rice crispies next time…

As always, if you have any comments or questions please feel free to leave them below and I’ll answer them directly or in the next installment.

 

Continue to How I Made an Elmo Cake… Part 3…

Once I’d determined the size and basic shape of the cake it was time to design the stand. This cake had originally been intended for a party 2 hours drive away. The head makes it quite top heavy so the stand needed to be designed well to make sure the cake didn’t fall over. The other consideration for the stand was that I wanted the smash cake to be removable so it could be lifted off and given to the birthday boy, but it needed to be sturdy enough not to move until then.

I had decided to use rice crispies for the arms and legs, with coat hanger wire support for the legs. I figured the icing should be able to hold the arms in place without needing extra support. Now I’ve made the legs a bit fancy, with his knees bent and having each leg at a slightly different angle. You can make it easier for yourself by having his legs straight on the board which means you wouldn’t need the wire supports.

The resulting stand consists of the base which is 40cm in diameter, a dowel up the center of Elmo’s body and head and a dowel to hold up the smash cake. The dowel up the center is made up of a 12mm width dowel up to the neck, then a disk to hold the weight of the head with a 9mm width dowel up through the head. The two dowels are held together by drilling a hole in the end of each and attaching them with a short piece of coat hanger wire. This makes a very strong joint that won’t break, but that can be easily pulled apart when cutting the cake or dismantling the stand. There is a 30cm piece of coat hanger wire for each leg, bent into shape and then placed into holes drilled into the cake board.

Now we get into the manly part of making cakes, the cake stand. We need a range of power tools for this job, including a jigsaw, a drill, a sander, a small saw for cutting the dowel and PVC pipe, pliers for bending the wire, and pliers or wire cutters for cutting the wire.

The materials I used were:

• 16mm MDF for the cake board
• 3mm MDF for the support disks
• 12mm dowel
• 9mm dowel
• 12mm PVC pipe
• 2 wire coat hangers

First step was to cut the 16mm MDF into a 40mm circle. I did this using a jigsaw, but you may be able to buy one ready made or get the hardware store to do it for you.

I printed the image on the right on an A4 piece of paper and taped it to the cake board with the cross at the center of the board. I could then drill the holes I needed in the cake board using this as a guide without needing to measure it all up. It needs a 12mm hole for Elmo’s dowel, halfway through the board, a 12mm hole for the smash cake dowel, halfway through the board, and 2mm holes for the wire leg supports. In the middle of each dowel hole there should be enough of a hole through the board for a screw to come up through the bottom.

Note: Your cake board doesn’t have to be round like mine. It can be any shape as long as the circles and holes of the plan fit on it.

Next I cut the dowels to length. One 12mm dowel to 175mm long, one 9mm dowel to 100mm long and another 12mm dowel to 125mm long. I sanded the tips of the two shorter dowels into a sort of rounded point. I drilled a 2cm hole in the middle of each end of the long 12mm dowel, and in the flat end of the other two dowels (Before drilling it might be worthwhile testing the coat hanger wire in an off cut to make sure it fits very snugly in the hole. If not then try different sized drill bits until you find the best fit).

The PVC pipe is used to hold up the mini board for the smash cake. It slides down over the dowel and the mini board rests on it. I cut the PVC pipe on an angle so the smash cake would sit on an angle. You can do this too or cut it straight if you want the smash cake to sit flat.

I cut three disks from the 3mm MDF to make the supports for the head, the mouth, and the mini board:

• One 85mm in diameter to support the head. The 85mm disk needs a 2mm hole drilled in the center so the wire connecting the dowels can go through it as it rests on the larger dowel of the body.
• One 150mm in diameter to support the mouth. The 150mm disk needs a 9mm hole drilled into the center so it’ll slide over the head dowel.
• One 110mm in diameter for the mini cake board. The 110mm mini cake board needs a 12mm hole drilled into the center so it’ll slide over the thicker dowel, resting on the PVC pipe. If you want it to sit at an angle you may need to widen the center hole a little to accommodate that. You don’t want this one too tight either, as it’ll need to slide off when you remove the smash cake.

Finally straighten the coat hangers and cut each to 30cm. From one of the off cuts, cut a straight piece around 4 cms long.

Putting it all Together

Start by sticking the 175mm long 12mm dowel into the Elmo hole in the board and secure it with a screw through the bottom. Position the 85mm disk over the top and stick the short piece of wire through the disk and into the hole in the dowel. Slide the 9mm dowel over the wire, and it should all be tight and sturdy.

Stick the other 12mm dowel into the smash cake hole and secure it with a screw through the bottom. Slide the PVC pipe over the dowel and slide the smash cake disk over the dowel.

Make any adjustments necessary to ensure it’s all sturdy and secure.

Next I used the image on the right, printed on an A4 piece of paper, as a guide for bending the coat hanger wire. Using pliers I bent the 30cm lengths of wire into shape following the top and side pics for each leg.

Once the wire is in shape place each end into the holes in the board. Adjust the bends if necessary to ensure a snug fit.

The stand is now pretty much complete. There should be a 150mm disk left over, but we’ll put that in position when we stack the cake. Make sure you wobble the head dowel a bit to make sure it’s in no danger of falling off, as the head will be quite heavy. The small disk will be enough to hold the weight, and the dowel should stop it toppling off.

Making The Icing

Hang on, we haven’t even started making the cake yet, what am I doing talking about the icing? Well here’s the thing about icing. Apparently when making icing, it needs to age if you want a rich deep color. Pastel colors can be made and applied straight away, but richer colors set in over the course of a few days. So I’ve read that it’s best to make the icing at least 3 days in advance.

The trouble with this theory is that it’s hard to know when you’ve used enough coloring. For my icing I may have used too much as he ended up darker red than I’d intended. I guess, like many things, it comes down to experience. For now I’ll tell you how much I used, and how much I’d try when I need to do it again and you can experiment a bit yourselves.

When it comes to coloring icing and especially fondant, it’s best to use concentrated gels instead of the liquid food coloring available from most supermarkets. Liquid colors tend to alter the consistency of fondant when used in quantities enough for anything other than very pastel colors. So if you can find the concentrated gels online or in specialty cooking or cake shops then use them instead.

The other reason to make the icing early is the fondant covered blocks if you choose to include them. They can be made up to a week early (or a month early if using rice crispies for them instead of cake) so you’re not doing everything at the last minute. I make my own fondant, but for something like this it’s just as easy to use store bought fondant if you wish. But again, for richer colors it’s best to make it a few days before you use it.

As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, I’d decided to use copha as a base for the butter cream icing, instead of butter, mainly because the cake would be outside on a warm day, possibly even in direct sunlight. The reason for this is that copha has a much higher melting point, and is harder when it’s solid. With the change of party plans, the cake ended up in the shade on not too warm a day so I didn’t get to test my theory fully. But I can safely say that the icing ended up much more solid than traditional butter based icing, and I do believe it would have held up under the sun considerably better.

I think I ended up making 3 batches of butter cream icing for the filling and crumb coat, and 3 batches for the fur. I ran out of icing for the fur, so I’d recommend making 4 batches for the fur for an Elmo this size. The crumb coat doesn’t have to be as deep in color as the fur coat, so you can use less color in the crumb coat icing. For the fur icing I used most of a 1 oz jar of Wilton’s Red concentrated gel, but next time I’d try around 1/2 a jar, as it reached a point when mixing that it didn’t change color no matter how much gel I put in. I think next time when I reach that color I’ll stop and see how that goes once it’s set in.

For the fondant, one batch should be enough depending on the number of blocks and toys you want to make, and you can either buy ready made chocolate or black fondant for the inside of the mouth, or you can make up another 1/2 batch. It’ll be easiest to color the fondant as we go since each block doesn’t need very much colored fondant, and it’ll be best to have lots of different colored blocks.

Thanks for reading this far. In the next installment I’ll talk about making and carving the cakes, making and molding the rice crispy arms, legs, eyes and nose, creating the blocks, and possibly get as far as piping the fur.

 

Continue to How I Made an Elmo Cake… Part 2…

It started a few weeks ago as I was trying to decide what cake to make for Anastasia’s birthday. I knew I’d have to top Serenity’s Dorothy cake, but there was no way I was doing anything as full on as the Lion King cake. But it seemed every time I asked Anastasia what she wanted, it was something different. To the point that one time I asked she scanned the kitchen and promptly replied with “A fly swat cake Dad”. I figured I’d have to actually make her something as random as fly swat cake or stop asking and come up with something myself. Of the many things to choose from Disney Fairies is up at the top, and Rani, the water-talent fairy is her favorite as she got a Rani doll for her last birthday, and her fairies bed spread has her sleeping on a Rani pillow every night. So it wasn’t too difficult to come up with the idea of making a Rani cake. Another bonus was that I could choose to include the wings or not, as Rani is the only fairy that doesn’t have wings (I feel like I may know a little too much about this stuff…).

Lately “I can sing a rainbow” is one of Anastasia’s favorite songs, so I thought that it would also be fun to try making a rainbow cake rather than the chocolate I normally make.

So I had the plan. Make the stand, bake cakes and make fondant on Tuesday, carve the cakes and do the rice crispies on Wednesday, and cover with fondant on Thursday, leaving Friday to complete Elmo.

Tuesday I had no probs making the stand and cakes, but being the actual day of Anastasia’s birthday, the morning was taken up with presents and making the stand, and in the afternoon we had some friends and relatives coming that weren’t able to make it to the party on Saturday. I also had to re-use cake tins, so had to wait until the first batch of cakes were cooled before making the second batch which put me further behind. So I didn’t get around to making the fondant that day. But that’s ok, there would still be time to make the fondant the next day as I wouldn’t really need it until Thursday.

I had read up online about how to make rainbow cakes. Just separate the cake mix into different bowls and color each bowl. If you add the mixture to the cake pans carefully it should end up with bands of color. It seemed to go ok but I wouldn’t know for sure until I cut them.

Wednesday I was excited to start carving the cakes so I could see how the rainbow worked. I was surprised how vibrant the colors were, as the mixture was fairly pastel colors. But it looked pretty cool. I did learn that the bottom color gets smooshed down flatter than the others, and the top color gets some cut of when leveling, so if each cake as three or more colors, as these did, you need to make more of the top and bottom colors.

So I stacked and carved the cakes, all going well until I realised the cakes were higher than I’d planned and I kinda ran out of room for her neck. I also made a boo-boo in my planning, with the arm supports as a single piece of wire running through the dowel in the middle. Since the cake was higher it covered the hole for the wire, so I had to make an extra cut in the cake. It may have been easier to have each arm a separate wire, although that would have had its own set of issues. But when all was said and done it was looking ok, and I still had plenty of time to make the fondant.

While the cakes were back in the freezer getting nice and firm before I put rice crispies on them, I made the fondant. Once that was done I made up a batch of rice crispies and pulled the cake out of the freezer. It didn’t take very long to put on the rice crispies as there wasn’t too much to do, and as far as the face went I didn’t have to be too precise as I’d be able to do a bit more molding with the fondant. I had planned to use modeling chocolate to pad out the arms, as they were too thin to use rice crispies. Since the shoulders were a bit thicker though I thought I’d have a go at putting rice crispies there since I wasn’t actually sure how much modeling chocolate I had, and didn’t have any ingredients to make more. Luckily the cold from the cake set the crispies pretty well so they stayed in place quite nicely. I thought I’d try rice crispies for the inside of the feet too since there was plenty left over, the less fondant I needed to use the better.

Then it was back in the freezer for the night to set everything good and solid for fondant the next day.

Thursday as I was getting started on the fondant it started to rain. “Yay” I thought, as the rain should keep the temperature down. Unfortunately the rain didn’t last and the sun came out soon after making it hot and humid. But more on that in a bit.

I procrastinated a little as I realised that once I started I couldn’t really stop until it was almost finished. I’d originally planned to put the modeling chocolate on the arms first, freeze that for a bit to set the chocolate, then continue with the fondant. But looking at it I wouldn’t have room to put skirt on if the arm was padded, so I’d have to do the chocolate after the skirt. I wrote a list to make sure the order I did everything was correct. Lily, then skirt, then arms, torso, face and finally hair and decorations. If I waited too long between any of these stages the cake would thaw, becoming softer than I like it to be for working on.

I started by covering the feet. I could do that without getting the cake out of the freezer, but then it was time to start covering.

I started with the lily. It ended up a bit thinner than I imagined, but it was ok, you wouldn’t be able to see much of it once everything else was done. Then I put the feet in place ready for the skirt. With the feet on it was easier to imagine what it was going to look like in the end which was encouraging. The skirt went on in a few stages which made it easier. The resting arm support was lower than I’d planned, actually sitting on the cake, which meant I’d have to cut the fondant to go around it, but the arm would hide the cut so that was ok.

It ended up trickier than I’d anticipated to create the folds in the skirt. Opposed to past experience the fondant didn’t want to fold as it went on, but was smoothing itself. Perhaps because I was doing it with smaller pieces rather than one big piece, perhaps the fondant was a bit thinner, perhaps due to the humid weather, probably a combination of them all.

With the skirt done it was time to make the arms. I got out the modeling chocolate (left over from what was originally made for the Lion King cake) and found that the bag had a hole in it and the chocolate had totally dried up. Possibly it would have over that amount of time anyway, but try as I might to revive it, it remained stubbornly crumbly. I had a go at putting it on the arm support, but it never really had a chance. I wasn’t sure what to do, as I knew fondant by itself wouldn’t stick to the wire, and by this time the heat and cake thawing was causing the rice crispies around the shoulder to fall apart. I needed something that would stick to the wire, support the rice crispies, and hold up the fondant. There was only one thing that I could think of that would work, trusty old Blue Tack. Since no-one would be eating the arms anyway I figured it wouldn’t be a problem cheating a bit.

The Blue Tack worked a treat, and putting fondant on the torso and arms went without incident. I was a little worried about the weight of the fondant on the straight arm, but it held up ok. There was something else worrying going on though.

From the time the cake came out of the freezer it had started sweating. Beads of moisture forming on the butter icing and dripping down if left long enough. I was continually patting the icing dry with paper towels. I hadn’t come across this before, but I figured it must be the heat, as I’d made all my other cakes in winter. By the time I had covered the torso though, the moisture from the cake was actually starting to come through the fondant. Beads of moisture were appearing all over the skirt, and around where the arm was resting on the skirt it was just all wet. There wasn’t much to do but to hurry to get it covered. I had the air conditioner on, trying to keep the room cool. The weather also seemed to affect the fondant. It wasn’t drying out as it normally had, and was much stickier than I was used to, making it difficult to work with.

The next step was making the hands. Being in a hurry at this point, and having the fondant slippery and not very workable meant that the hands weren’t has good as I would have liked, but they were passable. The benefit to having the hands done is that the hand would help hold up the fondant of the straight arm as I was still a little worried about it slipping down.

Once I made the ruffs at the wrists the whole thing was getting very slippery and difficult to work on. It was also starting to get a bit late. I decided to do what hair I could and leave it at that for the day. I made the lower layers of hair, which covered the last open area of icing hopefully sealing it a bit from melting too much, and did a few decorations before freaking out too much at how wet the whole thing was. My sister had the idea that it was probably the added humidity that was causing the moisture, and it had been an evaporative air conditioner that I’d had on all day, not helping at all with the humidity level.

I put on the reverse cycle air conditioner in my study and put the cake in there for the night hoping that the reduced moisture in the air and cold would keep the cake from melting too much. I was quite worried about how it would hold up with a whole other day to go before the party.

Just over an hour later I checked on the cake to see how it was holding up. With great relief I saw that it had almost completed dried. The reverse cycle air conditioner was just what it had needed. I went to bed confident it would hold up nicely until morning.

There was only one problem remaining, and that was that I’d planned to have Rani finished by then, so I’d have time to finish Elmo. I figured I’d get Rani finished first, and then get as much as I could done on Elmo. At the very least I hoped I’d be able to get the cake iced even if I wasn’t able to complete the decorative bits.

The next day I checked the cake. Thankfully in the night it had fully dried out and the fondant that was there had hardened, so I didn’t have to be as careful with it as I worked on the face.

As I started on the face I wasn’t sure how best to combat the bumpiness of the rice crispies. Normally I’d just make the fondant as thick as possible so the bumps wouldn’t show through, but I needed the fondant to be thin because I’d be cutting the eyes out and I didn’t want the eyelids to be too thick. I decided to try two layers of fondant, keeping the overall thickness but allowing the top layer to be thin enough for the eyelids to work.

So I put a few bits of fondant in place to mold the face a bit, the nose, chin, a bit on the cheeks. I placed a layer of fondant over that, and then marked out where the features would go, the eyes, lips and eyebrows. Next I put on white for the eyeballs which would appear under the cut out eyelids, and put some padding for the lips. I also needed to pad the hair a bit, as I wanted it to have some body, and wanted a definite indent for the hair band.

The face ended up smooth enough and, although I could do with some practice molding faces out of fondant covered rice crispies, it didn’t look too bad. I was really happy with how the hair came out though. It had bulges in the right places, and the detailing really sold it. I hadn’t been sure how I was going to do the hair to start with, but what I stumbled onto worked really well.

There was just the head band to go and the fondant was finished, Yay! I made the head band and put Rani aside to firm up a bit before doing her makeup. It was finally time to get onto Elmo.

For Elmo I’d carved the cakes and done the crumb coat. I’d added rice crispies for the legs, feet, arms and hands. My wife made a special gluten and dairy free cake for Alekos’ smash cake (he has a bunch of food allergies). All this had been sitting in the freezer with a big snapper and half a sheep for two months, so I wasn’t sure how nice the cake would be, but it was more about the presentation, as there would be plenty of cake to eat from Rani. I’d also already made the eyes and nose out of rice crispies and fondant.

The first job was to make the smash cake, the little one Elmo is holding (Ok, I should mention that until a couple of months ago I didn’t know what a smash cake was. I found out it’s the special cake that young birthday kids are given for themselves to get messy with while the other or rest of the cake is cut for the guests). I made special icing that Alekos could eat, and put the cake together with some fondant decorations that could be taken off before giving him the cake. The smash cake sits on its own little cake board so it can be easily separated and given to the birthday boy.

Now my plan had been to have Elmo holding the cake, with a present and some blocks in front of him to hide the support structure, and the blocks would also spell out his name. I’d made the present and one block previously, and had the other blocks half made, all made out of cake and fondant so they could be little single serves.

I figured I’d ice Elmo first to make sure the most important part was done, and then get onto the remaining blocks if there was time. It was already mid afternoon on the day before the party…

I still had some chocolate fondant from the Lion King cake, of which I managed to salvage enough to roll out and use for the inside of Elmo’s mouth. I used some off-cuts to cut his pupils out from too, as I hadn’t made them earlier.

The red icing had also been sitting in the fridge for two months. Previously I’ve made icing with butter and icing sugar, but this time I made it out of copha (shortening) instead of butter. Alekos’ party was going to be outside and potentially warm. I was worried that butter icing might melt or at least go soft since I wouldn’t be able to control the environment, there might not even be any shade so it could be in full sun. I thought copha would hold up a bit better than butter as it’s got a higher melting point. Another benefit to using copha is the icing ends up white rather than the slightly yellow color of butter icing, so it colors better. And my wife actually prefers the taste of the copha icing as she thinks butter icing is too sweet.

When I was making the icing I wanted to make sure it was really red, a nice deep color. I’d read that the color sets in over time, that if you make it a few days early that it ends up with better color. I’d made it three days eary so it’d have time to set in, but as I was mixing, it just wasn’t getting anywhere near the color I wanted, it just stayed pink no matter how much coloring I put in. I ended up putting in almost an entire jar of Wilton red, along with some spashes of other red coloring I had and some Wilton pink. Nothing was even getting it remotely close. I thought Elmo would just have to be pinkish, and hoped that it at least got a little darker when it set in. I checked it every day to see how the color was going, but it didn’t change. Even after a week it hadn’t changed color. So I assumed the color hadn’t set in as I’d read, that Elmo would end up pink.

I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to do the fur look for the icing. I had a grass nozzle and a star nozzle. I thought one of those should work, as i’d seen “furry” cakes made with both. I thought I’d get slightly better results from the star nozzle, so I started with that one and whipped up half the icing. It darkened a bit as I whipped it, so that was encouraging.

Being fur, I needed to start at the bottom and work up so that hair layered properly. The only trouble was that I wasn’t sure I’d have enough icing, and didn’t have enough red coloring to make more. I decided to do the most important areas first. After doing a patch on the back to test my technique I started on the face. To my surprise as the icing ran through the heat of my hand on the icing bag it was turning a really deep red. The warmer the icing got the deeper the color went. So I guess the color really had set in, or perhaps it had just needed to be warmed from the beginning, I’m not sure.

I worked on the front and head, working up from the chest to the head. I put fur on the front of the arms and legs and feet. I just spread the icing on the underside of the legs, and the back. I neded up with just enough to give it all a coating of the deeper red color (the crumb coat had been quite pink) with fur on the most visible areas. I tried to make the fur look like clumps of scruffy hair. I must admit I rushed it a bit, but it didn’t look too bad.

It was getting on for 10pm by the time I finished the icing, and I still had Rani’s makeup to do, so I put on the eyes and nose, and put the present and block in place and called it done.

I pulled out my colors and prepared to paint Rani’s face. Being late and I was pretty tired by this point, I didn’t think it through very well before painting the face, and the color ended up much darker than I’d intended. I would have preferred it to be much more subtle, but it wasn’t too bad, and I couldn’t do anything about it at that point anyway.

So even though I was running late and skipped some bits, I’d managed to get both cakes done with enough time for a good nights sleep before the party.

Here are some more pics of the finished Rani cake:

And here’s the result of the rainbow colors:

An interesting side effect of rainbow cake is green poo. You might not normally even notice, but Serenity had two pieces of rainbow cake and the next day when we changed her nappy, her poo was bright radioactive green.

Speaking of green, you can just see my patriotic green and yellow cream puffs in the background there. I’m planning red and green ones for Christmas…

If anyone knows more about the science of coloring icing, or how to better deal with cake decorating in hot humid weather I’d love to hear from you so please leave a comment. For example if the color doesn’t show it’s true intensity until it’s heated a few days after coloring, how do you know how much color to put in? Or does it just come down to experience?

Likewise, if you have any questions about what I’ve done here please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.