This is the sesame street cake I created for my niece's birthday. Her mother was very specific about what she wanted, but provided only a picture from the internet for me to work from. The original picture is here -

 

After seeing the picture all I could think was "hey! I might be able to do that!!"

 

I used the same cake recipes as my castle cake post (the doctored chocolate pudding mix, and the vanilla almond sour cream cake) because I knew they would hold up the the weight of the tiers and I had to travel with the cake so I wanted it to be sturdy.

 

For the letters I used stencils from Michael's, placed on top of the fondant and painstakingly cut out with a small knife. Definitely learned that the investment in a cake decorating letter press could be useful.

 

The faces were another story. I could not, for the life of me find cookie cutters of the faces for the characters. I thought maybe I could eyeball it from looking at online pictures but the result was some freakish red face with big googly eyes that did not resemble any character I had ever seen before. - My solution was to print photos off to the proper size. I copied images from google and pasted them into microsoft word. In word, when you right click on an image and go to properties, you are given the option to resize the image. Because my cake tier was 4" high, I knew I wanted the faces to be no larger than 3". Now I was onto something.

 

Scissors in hand, I cut out the images. Then, using the same technique as the stencils, I placed the cut out over the fondant and lo and behold I had a shape that resembled elmo's head! I then cut out the other components, eyes, nose, etc, and repeated the process which ensured I got appropriate dimensions. I connected the pieces using a paint brush in a little warm water, and secured the faces to the cakes in the same way.

 

Not only did the pieces stay attached, but they turned out great! People kept asking my sister-in-law where she had the cake done, it was a great feeling.

 

In this case - I DID IT :)