The How-To's of Elmo Cupcakes

I knew I wanted to do something cute and special for Madeline's class to enjoy on her birthday, and when I saw these cupcakes, I knew I'd found what I was looking for.

I broke it into a three-night process, which I'm so glad they did because the decorating did take a while. On night one, I made the icing. I made two batches of the standard Wilton Buttercream recipe because it stands up well for decorating. On a side note, I do find it a little funny this is called buttercream because there's no butter in it.

On night two, I baked the cupcakes. I just used a box funfetti mix for these. You could use any kind you want. I also did the prep work for the topping and cut the Oreos. This ended up being a little more challenging than I imagined, and I highly suggest using a serrated knife to do this part.

On night three, the real fun began.

1. Give each cupcake a thin layer of icing. I just used the white icing that I hadn't colored yet. Think of this icing as the glue that will hold the decorations in place.

2. Stick half an Oreo into the frosting, leaving room to be able to run a layer of icing below it for the bottom of the face.

3. Cut a large marshmallow down the middle, leaving the two halves joined. Stick it into the frosting, leaving room above to fill out the fop of his face.

4. The original instructions called for using an orange peanut M&M for the nose, but I couldn't do this because there's a no-peanut rule at her daycare for allergy reasons. Instead I made some orange icing using the still uncolored batch of white Wilton icing. I used a Wilton #8 round tip to make the nose.

5. Make the red icing. I used the Wilton no-taste red gel over food coloring because when you're trying to make really red icing, regular food coloring can give it an odd taste. You can find this stuff at Michael's, Hobby Lobby and even Walmart (in the craft area where they have cake decorating supplies - not the baking area). I used almost the whole container to give it a good red color, and I think it even darkened over night.

6. Using a Wilton star tip #21, fill in the rest of the cupcakes to make his fur.

7. Using a Wilton round tip #5, place a small dot of chocolate icing on the marshmallows to make the eyes. I just used canned stuff because I didn't know how much icing I'd have left and didn't want to run short. In the end, the double batch of icing was more than enough, but I'm still glad I did the canned stuff for the eyes.




And now for my tips/thoughts:

• Resist the urge to just do the stars and then shove everything into them. By placing the thin layer of icing down and putting the toppings in, you save a lot of time and star making. Also, when I first started I thought that the Oreo and marshmallows were going to be way too thick and look weird. But when I iced around them with stars, it all leveled out. I do not think this would have been the case if I had done a blanket covering of stars and then pushed everything into them.
• Breaking it into smaller tasks over several evenings made this much easier. Don't get me wrong, they were still time consuming, but I would have been up until midnight or later if I'd tried to do everything last night.
• I'd originally planned on just buying one of those snack size, single-row boxes of Oreos. Don't do that. Buy a whole pack of Oreos. I say this for several reasons. First, cutting them isn't as easy as you'd think and I broke a bunch. Second, it's pretty much impossible to have Oreos in the house and not want to eat a few. If I had got that small box, I don't know that I would have had enough considering the breakage factor (of course, dropping my container of cut Oreos on the floor didn't help matters, either).

If you make these, let me know how it goes. I loved taking them in this morning and having the girls at daycare rave about how cute they were and how Madeline's mommy went all out for her birthday.