Easy Elmo Cupcakes

These adorable Elmo cupcakes are easy to make using Oreos and candy eyes. Here's how:

Step 1: Bake cupcakes any any flavor.

Step 2: Make white icing (vanilla buttercream, almond, cream cheese, marshmallow, lemon, mint, etc). 

Step 3: Place a few tablespoons of white icing in a small bowl. Dye it orange for Elmo's nose.

Step 4: Dye remaining icing red. When making red icing, I always make pink first, then add the red. If you're using Wilton gel, remember that it will darken over time. Try to get as red as possible but know that it will be an even more intense shade in a few hours.

Step 5: Apply red frosting on cupcakes using a star tip. Pipe around the outside and work your way inward.

Step 6: To make the mouth, use Oreos (or cheap sandwich cookies). Scrape the icing off and cut each chocolate cookie in half.

Step 7-8: Apply cookie mouths and candy eyes on the cupcakes. If you're making these a day in advance, the cookie mouth will soften. You could wait to put the mouths on right before you serve them if you wanted the cookie to stay crunchy.

This package of candy eyes was $2 at Walmart.

  
Step 9: Pipe an orange nose in the center of each cupcake. I used a round tip, but you could just cut the corner off of a ziploc bag and use that.

Step 10: Serve and eat!

You could avoid making and dying icing by purchasing ready-to-decorate red icing and using orange jelly beans or orange peanut M&Ms for the nose.

I served these with cookie monster cupcakes, which are made the same way except using blue icing and half a mini chocolate chip cookie. (I cut Famous Amos cookies in half.)