C is for Cookie

When my brother temporarily changed his Facebook profile picture to a shot of him and cookie monster a few months before his birthday, an idea was born! I scoured the internet for ideas and knew I HAD to make him cookie monster cupcakes.

My sister-in-law's birthday is just over a week before my brother's, and I knew there was no way we could eat 4 dozen cupcakes in a 2 week time period. So I decided to make one batch of chocolate cupcakes, bake half, and save the rest for the next weekend. We were preparing for a big Memorial Day cookout in the mountains the same weekend as my brother's birthday, so I was hoping this would be a time saver as well. I froze half the batter and kept the icing in the fridge for a week. The batter did take a while to thaw, submerging the container in bowls of hot water and switching out the water when it got cold, but after it thawed, it baked up just like always. I might have left them in the oven a couple of minutes longer, because the batter was still pretty cold. The refrigerated icing seemed to be just like normal as well.

I couldn't find any solid blue cupcake liners at the grocery store, so I went with some blue and white polka-dotted ones that I already had on hand. With the chocolate batter, the liners weren't too noticable anyway.

While the cupcakes cooled, I mixed up the icing. It took a lot of royal blue food coloring to get that perfect Cookie Monster blue! I used Wilton tip 233 to make the fur. It wasn't difficult at all, but it took a lot longer than the big icing swirls I usually do on my cupcakes. I hadn't planned to put that much time into it!!

For the mouths, I bought some Chips Ahoy cookies and cut them in half. (I found that a sawing motion worked best and broke the least amount of cookies.) I tried to stick the cookies in at an angle, to make it look like Cookie Monster was actively chowing down on them. By the next day, most of them were still in place, but there were a couple that were lying flat.

I knew we would be rushing out the door to try to get to the mountains (and were a lot later than planned, because of the thawing and "fur" icing) so I bought store made icing for the eyes. In order to save myself an extra trip to Michael's, I bought a tube of  Betty Crocker white icing and a small tube of black decorating gel. The Betty Crocker icing is convenient because I can buy it at Publix along with the rest of my supplies, but it doesn't fit any of my Wilton tips. I had been planning to use a large round tip, like the Wilton 10, for the whites of the eyes, but I didn't have a Betty Crocker tip that size. I had to use a large star tip to pipe the eyes and then flatten them out with a wet decorator brush. This worked pretty well, but again, more time!! The black decorator gell worked really well for the pupils of the eyes, giving them a nice shiny effect.

We surprised my brother with the cupcakes, and his face lit up when he saw them. I think I even got a "That's awesome!"