Sesame Street Cupcakes

Elmo Cupcakes

125 grams butter
1/2 cup sugar
3 eggs
3 tablespoons strawberry pudding powder (instant pudding, angel delight, etc.) plus extra red food colouring
1 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup milk

Decoration:
125 grams butter
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
3 tablespoons strawberry pudding powder/milkshake mix
Dessicated coconut
Red food colouring
White chocolate buttons
Dark chocolate drops
Orange gobstoppers (or other spherical, orange candy)
Oreo cookies

Heat the oven to 180 degrees. Line a 12-hole muffin tin with paper liners and set it aside.

Soften the butter a little in the microwave, then add the sugar and beat until it is creamy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. The batter should be smooth and quite liquid at this point.

Add the flavouring and colouring and beat the mixture well again. 

Sift in the flour and baking powder and beat again, then beat in the milk. Spoon the mixture into the prepared muffin tins.

Bake the cupcakes for about 20 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Let the cupcakes cool in the tin for about 5 minutes, then remove them and let them finish cooling on a wire rack.

Decorating
Soften the butter, then beat the icing sugar and pudding mix into it (or leave it out if you don't have any and maybe add a little vanilla essence). Take a little of the frosting out and put it on a plate - you will need some plain coloured frosting to stick all the facial features on. Then add colour to the bulk of the frosting to make it as red as possible.

Pour some coconut into a bowl and add red food colouring. Stir it all about, add more colour if you need to, until the coconut is bright red. You will find that the coconut picks up the colour much better than frosting and cake batter does.

Prepare the faces. Stick the chocolate drops onto the chocolate buttons using plain frosting. Carefully separate each oreo cookie and then gently slice each in half, to make two half-circles. Have these and the gobstoppers (or alternative nose candies) ready for the next stage.

Spread a nice thick layer of frosting onto each cupcake (do them all at the same time so you can be sure you have enough frosting for all of them). Then roll the top of the cupcake in the coconut into all of the frosting is covered. Now Elmo has fur. Press an oreo half into one side of the cupcake. Then press a gobstopper above that. Finally, add two eyes. You might need to attach them with a small blob of non-coloured frosting. A couple of my Elmo's looked a bit insane - I googled a picture of the real Elmo and discovered that, first of all, his nose is not touching his mouth, and secondly, his eyes are very close together. So that is how you make Elmo:

Cookie Monster Cupcakes
You just need a couple of small changes to make cookie monster cupcakes instead.

1. Make them blue. Make them vanilla flavoured, or any flavour really (you can use custard powder instead of pudding/milkshake powder). Make the frosting and coconut blue.

2. You will need white chocolate buttons and chocolate drops, but Cookie Monster has no nose so you don't need to worry about that. He does have a mouth, so you could use oreo halves again. Or you could use small chocolate chip cookies, cut in half and stuck on with frosting so that it looked like he was munching cookies. I think it would be good to have a mixture of both.