La la la la, Elmo's World

La la la la, la la la la, Elmo's wooooooooorld...

I made these Elmo Cupcakes for a 3 year-old's birthday.

Recipe Source: Nigella Lawson's 'How to be a Domestic Goddess'
Ingredients - Cupcakes
125g butter
125g caster sugar
2 large eggs
125g self raising flour
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 - 3 tbsp milk


Method
1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C.
2. Blend all ingredients except for milk in a food processor.
3. Add milk while pulsing to combine.
4. Add cocoa or other flavouring/colour if desired.
5. Line a 12 space muffin/cupcake tin with patty pans.
6. Spoon batter into the patty pans, make sure there is an even amount in each.
7. Bake for 15 - 20 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle of a cupcake comes out clean.

After baking the cupcakes, I whipped up some simple buttercream - a pleasant change from the more complex French version I've been making recently.

Ingredients - Buttercream

125g butter/margarine

1 1/2 cups icing sugar

2 tbsp milk

Method

1. Beat butter until soft and white.

2. Add icing sugar and beat.

3. Add milk and beat until a spreadable consistency.  If needed, add more milk.

4. Add food colouring and combine.

Mum and I spread red buttercream onto the cupcakes, making sure that the icing looked fluffy and Elmo-like.

We then tinted some fondant black, and rolled it out thinly.  Using a circular cookie cutter, we cut out big circles from the fondant then cut them in half for Elmo's mouth.

Two other portions of fondant were left white and tinted orange respectively for Elmo's eyes and nose.  We rolled them into balls, making the orange ones a bit more oval-shaped.

Using my fantastic edible ink marker, Mum drew dots onto the white balls for Elmo's eyes.

We placed the eyes near the top of the cupcake, the nose partly overlapping onto them.  The mouth was placed below.  Here is our first Elmo with his face put together:

He's a bit cute, huh?  Mum tweaked the rest of the black semicircles up at the corners so Elmo would look more smiley.

[Insert frenzied fondanting here]

Hooray, it's...many Elmos!

After admiring them for a bit and snapping some photos, I loaded them into a big box and stuffed them in the fridge.  It was pretty difficult to put them all in the box without getting red-coloured sugary goodness all over my fingers, because the buttercream went right over the edge of the cupcake; difficult to grab.


That aside - apparently everyone liked the cupcakes at the birthday girl's party, and they were recognisable as Elmo.  (Phew!)

Cupcakes of the Sophisticated Kind

These super sophisticated cupcakes were created for a birthday. I made some plain vanilla cupcakes, and some chocolate ones (just added cocoa until they were suitably chocolaty).  The recipe can be found here - just ignore the orange.  Again, I made big cupcakes and small; but most big.

The whizzed-up batter; it tastes delicious.  Believe me.

The cupcakes rose quite a bit in the oven, and unevenly too, to my aggravation.

So, I had to take action.  With a knife.

What a shame, all those scraps...

To top the cupcakes, I whipped up some buttercream then tinted it caramel-brown, and left some ganache I'd prepared earlier out to return to room temperature.

I piped on the buttercream studded it with silver cachous.  These cupcakes made me laugh.

As for the ganache...while I was piping, Mum took up a spatula and ganachified the other cupcakes.  I really like how she did them.  I dipped some of the mini cupcakes in 100s and 1000s...

 ...and Mum insisted on popping some sugar flowers on the big cupcakes.

Which, I must admit, look gorgeous.

It was late, and a school night, so of course I had to snap a couple more photos.

Enjoy!