COOOOOKIEEEEE!!!

Posted on 02. Feb, 2009 by Rob in Around Singapore

So, I am getting a bit of a hassle from some of my Facebook “friends” about how I managed to craft these Cookie Monster cupcakes for Liam’s classroom birthday party. 

Cookie Monster cupcakes

Read on for the details…

I found this photo on a photography/design website  and figured I’d whip some up without really having any directions/recipe.

My approach is pretty straightforward really.

This makes roughly 24 – 36 cupcakes.

I also need to give some of the credit to our friend and general sanity-keeper Marieta, who mixed, baked and frosted the cupcakes. I left the baking to the expert.

Ingredients
Chocolate Cake mix (2 boxes) – I used Duncan Hines
White Chocolate Buttons – or whatever you can find that are similar. I was hoping to find something spherical actually, but these were the closest our supermarket had to offer.

Chocolate Buttons (chocolate chips will do if you’re half-assing it)

Kelapa Parut Kering, or what your people call Dried Coconut 

Chocolate Chip Cookies (Don’t get mini cookies, not proportionally accurate) If  you are a real go-getter, you can make your own.
 
White Cake Frosting recipe from Betty Crocker Cookbook. I couldn’t find white frosting at the store, but this frosting was easy to make and was probably a bit more mixable which was key to making it blue.
Blue Food Coloring 

Assembly
There aren’t too many curveballs involved in making these things, but here are a few tips:

Baking the Cupcakes
You need to fill the cups higher than the directions on the cake mix box recommend. You want the cupcakes to rise as high as possible, but you’ll find that when cooked they spill out more horizontally than you probably want. No worries, just trim the edges off after they cool. What you don’t want is a bunch of recessed cupcakes. No fun.

Affixing the Chocolate Buttons to the larger White Chocolate Buttons
1. It is hot in our kitchen, so to keep the eyes from melting, I put the bowls in a larger bowl with ice

2. To affix the eyes, I put a small pan of water on low heat and  set a couple of knives with plastic handles in to heat the business end. I laid out a couple of white buttons on the counter, grabbed a brown button pressed the warm knife to the back and set it on the white button (never in the center, for that crazy Cookie Monster look). They stuck great, not one fell off. I made a couple eyes then swapped knives. Took me about 5 minutes to do 50 eyes. Put them in the fridge ’til you need them.
 

Making Things Blue
To make the coconut blue I put about 1/3 of the pack in a bowl, dropped in about 5 tablespoons of water and 4 drops of food coloring… give or take a couple of drops. I found that it worked best to make the first 1/3 of the coconut DARK blue, then add half the remaining coconut until it was saturated, then add in the remaining coconut. It made the coconut three shades of blue which helped with the overall effect. Then I fluffed the heck out of it to help it dry. I actually put it in the oven at super low heat for a while to help dry it out. The less clumps the easier it is to stick to the frosting.

For the frosting… just whip in the blue food coloring until it approximates the color of the coconut. 

Adding Fur
Frost as you would any cupcake, then I just dipped the frosted cupcake into the “fur”. If it didn’t seem adequate enough, I just sprinkled/pressed a little extra on the bald spots.

The Mouth
I used a paring knife to cut a smiley mouth wide enough to accommodate the cookie. The excess flicked out nicely if cut properly.
 

The Cookie
Cut the cookie in half and jam it in. Rocket science.
Just be a bit cautious not to split the cupcake. Make sure the mouth is big enough. 

Mounting the eyes
Do this last so they don’t melt while you’re mounting the cookie.
Cut a slit where you plan on placing them and cram the eyes in. (Make sure they are not looking in the same direction!)

Voila!

I found these tin cupcake holders and thought that they’d be great for Oscar the Crouch cupcakes, but as it turns out, Oscar isn’t really on my kids’ radar… yet. I need to start force-feeding them some YouTube clips of some classic Sesame Street.

Extra Credit
If you want to get really creative and meta on these things, prior to baking, try dropping some chocolate chip cookie dough in the cup before adding the cake mix for a semi-digested cookie surprise!  You might even be able to get away with only using one box of cake mix this way too.

Here’s Liam sharing them with his classmates
 



Nolan’s Birthday is right aroud the corner… I’m thinking Elmo.
Any other suggestions?

Tags: Birthday