What little kid wouldn’t want a cake shaped like “Elmo” or “Cookie Monster” (as seen here) or – as also seen here – a “Mutant Ninja Turtle” for his or her birthday?
The nice thing about making a character cake is you don’t need a year’s worth of decorating experience in order to pull this off!
Once you have some of the basics in your decorating supply closet, you could not only be making cute cakes easily for the little ones in your own life, but you could most likely hire yourself out to deliver them to your childrens’ friends parties too!
(Of course, there is a lot involved in starting and running a cake decorating business from home, but even if you just made them occasionally as a gift, that would also be amazing!)
So, last week, “Honorary Daughter Maddie” made the “Cookie Monster” cake that you see at the top, and “Honorary Daughter Kim” made the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle” cake you also see here…
One thing I have learned from these gals – who are truly some of my favorite people in the world and if they were available for adoption, I’d adopt them both – is that they know how to have fun and bring a smile to other people! 
The nice thing about using character form pans like the girls did here, is that the outline for the decorating is built in. How perfect is that? It’s almost as though a cake becomes more of a “color by numbers” type of project rather than total guesswork.
The “Ninja Turtle” cake pan is a retired design, but you can still occasionally find them at yard sales, thrift stores, Amazon or eBay. But, considering the world of kids cartoon characters is always changing, there will always be new designs coming out!
If you check the little slideshow I did using Amazon products, below, you will get an idea as to what other characters are popular with kids today – and if you show up at the next neighborhood birthday party with one of these, you will undoubtedly be a hit!
So, what the girls used is what’s called a “contour” cake pan. Typically aluminum, these character cake pans are shaped in the form of the character – and a lot of these come with decorating instructions.
UPDATE! UPDATE! Not TWO DAYS after writing this post, I was at a Goodwill Thrift Store… And GUESS what I found?
If you guessed “more character cake pans?” You are RIGHT! CLICK HERE to see my update post on finding more character cake pans. How much fun was that!! (The post will open in a new window for your convenience.)
IMPORTANT TIP: When baking cakes using these detailed contour pans, be sure you properly grease and flour the pan to avoid losing part of the cake to “sticking.” While there are SOME non-stick cake pans, most of these character shaped cake pans are aluminum.