Elmo Cupcakes

Last year, for Christmas, my two year old received a tickle me Elmo from her papa. Since then she has been slightly obsessed with Elmo. So when it came time to decide what to make for her birthday it was a no brainer. Plus, I just love how she says Elmo in her sweet little voice `el-o` 🙂

These cupcakes are super easy to make (although I do have to warn you they are fairly time consuming)

Want to see how I did it?
Alrighty.

First step: make the cupcakes. Usually I make chocolate but this time I decided to do rainbow. It was fun to see everyone`s reaction when they took a bite and realized that they looked like this inside:

To make the rainbow effect all I did was make 2 boxes of white cake (you can do the same with just 1, but I needed a lot for her party.)

Then I separated the batter into 6 bowls and added food coloring to each bowl making up a different color.
Next I just spooned a little of each color into each muffin cup (sorry I forgot to take a picture at this point) but here’s how they look after coming out of the oven:

And that’s it. A little extra effort and they turned out super fun!

Next I made the red icing.
Ok, here’s where I warn you- it takes A LOT of red food coloring to get the icing this red (especially if you’re using a lot of icing- which I was)
Wow. Seriously. A lot. I had to run out to the store and buy more food coloring because I ran out. I like to use the Wilton gel kind because I find the liquid kind will change the consistency of my icing too much.

Now, to get the furry look for Elmo I used a Wilton tip 233. (I bought a set of tips a couple years ago from walmart. They were fairly inexpensive and super helpful when decorating cakes, but you can buy the tips separately from walmart or micheals) It looks like this.Just pack your icing into a piping bag (or a ziplock bag works too) attach your tip and go crazy. Beware. Your hand will hurt after all that piping. Y-ouch! 🙂

And finally the fun part- decorating!
Here’s what you’ll need:
Mints and Chocolate chips (eyes)
Orange jellybeans (nose)
Oreo cookies (mouth)

(I did try these with marshmallows and brown smarties for the eyes, but I prefer the smaller look with the mints and chocolate chips)

Lets start with the mouth. Just separate an Oreo in half, wipe off the white filling and then cut each half in half and voila you’ve made Elmo’s mouth. Each Oreo should give you 4 mouths. Although it was more like 1-2 for me because I kept cracking them. Grrrrr!

To make the eyes I just took a chocolate chip and cut off the tip (which is what takes the longest in this whole process)
Now, you’ll need to attach the chocolate chips to the mints somehow. I was planning on making another batch of white icing and using that as the glue, but then I came up with a genius idea to use the white filling part of the Oreos. Yippee. It worked like a charm 🙂

Once you’ve made all the eyes and mouths you can start assembling.
Just remember if you ice all your cupcakes first and then start making the eyes and mouths your icing will harden too much and it’ll make applying the face a pain in the behind. So make all your parts first and then ice those baby’s and add their little faces as you go.

And that’s it!

Linked to: