Cookie Monster Cupcakes

Can we get a little personal for a minute? This certainly has nothing to do with web design and it’s probably a stretch to even say that it related to graphic design but it certainly is creative and it makes me happy so I’m posting it!

See most of the work I do makes me happy and even though I’m not a baker, there is a 50% chance it’s in my genes, I mean look at my cousin Mel’s cupcake shop!

Most of you who know me, know that my twin boys (←warning: blog that gets yearly updates!) turned three today! And this being their first year in preschool I got really excited about the cupcakes we were going to take to school. I googled a few ideas and almost opted for store bought cupcakes because most of them were pretty complicated and we’ve been pretty busy lately. Then I ran across the cookie monster cupcake! And it was pretty perfect. The boys LOVE cupcakes, cookies and marshmallows. Trifecta.

So here’s how I did it in 6 easy steps!

1. Bake the cupcakes of your choosing, making sure to fill the cups to the top. We went with the quintessential funfetti flavor, one box filled 12 cupcakes.

2. While they are baking you can prepare the googley eyes.

All the examples I saw used white chocolate discs. But the boys love them some “mellows” so I wanted to find a way to make this work. They are just large marshmallows with dollops of blue gel icing. I let these sit for about an hour before I put them on the cookie monster cupcake so the gel didn’t run.

3. Next the fur.

I put half a bag of coconut into the food processor with a whole tube of blue gel icing. Just be careful when you are doing this because I noticed steam coming from the top, after spinning it for a while. Sorta worried I was burning up the machine, I checked and thankfully the steam wasn’t hot it was cold? I was actually beginning to liquify the coconut and it was creating a mist. So don’t do that.

Once I got the coconut to the blue hue I wanted, I transferred it to a bowl and mixed in a shaker of sprinkles to make cookie monster a little bit sparkly and fabulous. Ha, my poor boys.

Now that they’ve baked and have nice big muffin tops (finally, a situation when that’s actually desired!), let them cool and then you can begin icing and assembling.

What NOT to do. Don’t cut the mouth slot before you ice with frosting or your cookie monster will look like this:

4. First you’ll want to ice the top. I chose Pillsbury Easy Frost (which is 99% of the reason this was so darn easy). Then over the bowl of fur, holding the cupcake upright (or the muffin top will begin to separate), place handfulls of fur onto the icing. Rotate the cupcake from the base as you go and lightly pressing the fur down.

5. Mouth: Then after your satisfied with the fur coverage, take a serrated knife and give the little monster a mouth. Just cut about 1/4 of the way in at an angle so you don’t cut the whole top off or encourage it to separate. Then lift the knife to open the mouth and shove the Chips Ahoy cookie in!

6. Eyes: After the gel icing has set (note: it won’t be completely dry, just a little less gooey) take your serrated knife and cut a little of the rounded part off the marshmallows so the eyes will sit flat on the cupcake.

If not then they will either roll off or you will have to secure them with tooth picks. Which is neither cute nor safe, both of which we want our cookie monster cupcakes to be, right? See example pic of what-not-to-do above if you’re still contemplating securing with toothpicks.

After you cut a few you’ll want to rinse the mellow build up off the knife with hot water so you can keep getting nice clean cuts.

A little icing on the bottom of the eyes also helps them to stick.