As Promised I Present To You...

...my daughter's ELMO cupcakes!

They turned out really cute and I am just a little bit proud of them!

So let me give you the step-by-step on how I (with the help of my dear hubby who lovingly formed and colored the mouths at 11:30pm at night for me the night before the party) I came to create this cuteness!

I chose a really nice ready to bake chocolate cake mix by "Pamela's All Natural" I think it's called. I wasn't going to make the cake myself, just because I knew the faces would take up enough time to create. That cake mix is the bomb, by the way, the fluffiest and most chocolaty ever, much better than the Betty Crocker mix! I filled them into individual cupcake cups, not the cupcake pan, just because we made over 30(!) of 'em. Now, let me ask you: Am I obsessive/compulsive for making 30 cupcakes, if there are only 19 at the party?
So this is what it looked sans decoration:



I know, not that exciting yet. But wait, I'm building up to it! I decided to make it an all edible face (which was a bit traumatic for our youngest ones, who didn't like the idea of "eating" ELMO's face...) ELMO's nose and mouth were made of Marzipan, tinted orange and black respectively, and for the googely eyes I chose white Fondant (no, that's not wine), which turned out to be really easy to work with (I've never ever worked with Fondant and it turnes out to be a great medium!).
And here we have a very spooky looking assembly of facial parts:




And here I dear hubby, getting really into it! Thanks again for all your help, love!



For the frosting, I decided to make a cream cheese frosting, but added some Raspberry puree to it. Yes, I made that one from scratch, cooking, then pureeing it, in order to get all the seeds out. At first, I thought it would be easier to tint them red in the end because it's already red (which it did), but then I found out that it gave the frosting a really nice, tangy flavor, too! BONUS!! I wish it would have made the red a real ELMO red, but to tell you the truth, I was worried about putting that much food coloring into it...even though it's safe to eat, it just goes against my thinking. They did turn out a nice shade of red, just not THAT real ELMO red. I used a pastry bag for the "fur look". What a messy job!!

So this is one half of the final product. Cute, eh?





We had a lot of fun doing this, but it was a LOT of work! So please, don't come asking for ELMO cupcakes any time soon, OK?! Haha

Toodles,

Bettina