It was my husband's birthday yesterday. Last week, he sent me an email, with a birthday request: Please could I have these for my birthday? He'd found a photo of cookie monster cupcakes on the Internet, and thought they were the coolest cakes ever.
It so happens that his birthday coincided with my half term, so I have had some extra baking time this week. So I spent some of this time making the requested cupcakes.
The recipe starts, confusingly, with the decoration. I melted white chocolate and dropped it onto parchment paper to make the eyes. When these were set, I then melted dark chocolate and dripped it onto the eyes. I then dyed some coconut (approximately 200g at a guess) blue with food colouring. I spread this out onto a tray on greaseproof paper to dry.
For the sponge cupcakes, I used the recipe here:
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/470636/lemon-and-poppyseed-cupcakes, which uses natural yoghurt. I'm not sure about the science of it, but they taste really good, although I omitted the poppyseed. I didn't think they would work with the coconut.
When the cakes had cooked and cooled, I used more blue food dye (to make 12 cupcakes, I used 3/4 of a bottle) to dye some buttercream icing.
The comes the tricky bit: the assembly. You spread the icing onto the cupcakes, quite thickly. Then, working quickly, you turn each cupcake over and dip it in a bowl of the blue coconut, so that it sticks to the icing. When I had done this, I put them into the fridge to cool and set a bit. Then you need to cut a mouth out - and I needed to actually remove a chunk of cake. I halved some smallish chocolate chip cookie biscuits, trimming off the edges to get them into the mouths, and stuffed these into the cookie monster mouth. Finally, I placed the eyes on, making sure they were suitably wonky.
