Oh Pinterest, you've done it again! I would have never in my wildest dreams come up with this cookie monster cupcake idea on my own.
After seeing the pin, I couldn't find a good cookie monster cupcake tutorial online - just a lot of random pictures, so I wrote one myself. You can see it, in all it's glory, here.
Or follow the 6 easy steps below!
1. Bake the cupcakes of your choosing, making sure to fill the cups to the top. We went with the quintessential funfetti flavor, one box filled 12 cupcakes.
2. While they are baking you can prepare the googley eyes.
All the examples I saw used white chocolate discs. But the boys love them some “mellows” so I wanted to find a way to make this work. They are just large marshmallows with dollops of blue gel icing. I let these sit for about an hour before I put them on the cookie monster cupcake so the gel didn’t run.
3. Next the fur.
I put half a bag of coconut into the food processor with a whole tube of blue gel icing. Just be careful when you are doing this because I noticed steam coming from the top, after spinning it for a while. Sorta worried I was burning up the machine, I checked and thankfully the steam wasn’t hot it was cold? I was actually beginning to liquify the coconut and it was creating a mist. So don’t do that.
Once I got the coconut to the blue hue I wanted, I transferred it to a bowl and mixed in a shaker of sprinkles to make cookie monster a little bit sparkly and fabulous. Ha, my poor boys.
Now that they’ve baked and have nice big muffin tops (finally, a situation when that’s actually desired!), let them cool and then you can begin icing and assembling.
4. First you’ll want to ice the top. I chose Pillsbury Easy Frost (which is 99% of the reason this was so darn easy). Then over the bowl of fur, holding the cupcake upright (or the muffin top will begin to separate), place handfulls of fur onto the icing. Rotate the cupcake from the base as you go and lightly press the fur down.
5. Mouth: Then after your satisfied with the fur coverage, take a serrated knife and give the little monster a mouth. Just cut about 1/4 of the way in at an angle so you don’t cut the whole top off or encourage it to separate. Then lift the knife to open the mouth and shove the Chips Ahoy cookie in!
6. Eyes: After the gel icing has set (note: it won’t be completely dry, just a little less gooey) take your serrated knife and cut a little of the rounded part off the marshmallows so the eyes will sit flat on the cupcake.
If not then they will either roll off or you will have to secure them with tooth picks. Which is neither cute nor safe, both of which we want our cookie monster cupcakes to be, right?
After you cut a few of the mellows you’ll want to rinse the build up off the knife with hot water so you can keep getting nice clean cuts.
A little icing on the bottom of the eyes also helps them to stick.
And that's it. Seriously.
Made any creative cupcakes lately? Do share....

{photo credit: www.thedailygreen.com}