Let them Eat Cupcakes!

Tomorrow is one of my best friend's baby shower. It's the first friend of mine to have a baby, which kind of explains why I've spent a few paychecks on the kid already. I just can't help it!

Baby Linden is having an animal themed baby shower tomorrow (as if she'll really know) and her chosen animal is a fox, so I decided to browse Pinterest for some ideas for sweets that fit the theme.

I found two images of owl and fox cupcakes, but neither of the links had recipes attached, so I decided to wing it and create my own. They turned out pretty well if I must say!

Owl Cupcakes

Cross eyed? Perhaps.

You will need:

1 box cake mix (I used yellow)

1 bag double stuff Oreos

1 can white icing

1 bag Reese's Pieces

Pink food coloring

Cupcake liners

To assemble:

1. Bake cupcakes as directed.

2. While cupcakes are baking, mix red food coloring into the white icing. Mix until desired "pinkness" is achieved.

3. Carefully twist your Oreos apart. If you do this correctly, you'll have approximately 30 Oreo halves with frosting and 30 without. You can discard the ones without frosting, eat them, save them for another recipe whatever. The frosting halves will have some Oreo remnants on them, so take a knife and carefully take off the top layer. Don't apply too much pressure to the sides of the Oreos or they will break!

4. Separate your Reese's Pieces. You'll need 2 brown ones for each set of eyes and 1 orange one for each nose. You can eat the yellows like I did or save them for another recipe.








5. To make the eyes, apply a tiny amount of icing to the back of the brown Reese's Pieces. Press firmly onto the Oreo half wherever you'd like the eye. My owls seem to be a bit cross eyed, but I think they're cute.

6. When cupcakes are completely cooled you can begin to ice them. Apply a fairly generous amount of your pink icing to each cupcake and while the icing is still fresh press two of your eyes into the cupcakes. I found that placing the eyes about half way down the cupcake seemed to work fairly well.

7. Place the orange Reese's Pieces directly beneath the set of eyes so that it's vertical to the cupcake. Don't want a flat nose!

Ta-da!

You could easily change the color of the owl itself-- I opted for pink as it's for a baby girl's shower, but they could easily be any color under the sun!

Almost too cute to eat

Fox Cupcakes

 You will need:          

1 box cake mix (I used chocolate)

1 packet Caramel Frosting Creations

1 can Duncan Hines Frosting Creations icing base

Chocolate covered raisins or coffee beans 

1 small tube black icing

Can of white icing

1. Prepare cupcakes as directed.

2. To make the fox coloring, mix in the frosting creations packet into the icing base. Both of these were new products to me, but it made getting the fox color right pretty easy-- if these aren't available at your super market I did see a few grey color options in the icing department.

I thought I'd need two packets to get the coloring dark enough, but only needed one.

Pretty sure you could use any white icing with the packet?

3. When the cupcakes are completely cooled, begin by icing the white portion of the fox face. To do this, simply draw two half moons on either side of the cupcake using the icing tube or a knife. The brown icing will cover any white, so if you wanted to cover the entire cupcake with white you could, but the half moons were easy to create and made the perfect lines for putting in the brown icing!

4. After your white half moons are complete, take a knife and carefully fill in the brown icing at the top of the cupcake and down the center of the fox face.

5. To create "ears" take the tip of your knife and swirl it in the icing jar. The ears are tricky and none of mine look THAT awesome, but essentially just plop a bit on the cupcake and mess with it until you're happy. **If you had a pastry bag I'm assuming this would be a lot easier and prettier.**

6. Push a chocolate covered raisin or coffee bean between your two white half moons to create the nose and carefully create the eyes using your black icing.

Ta-da!

I will definitely make the owls again-- and the foxes as well, if I get a cheap pastry bag to make the icing a lot easier. All in all, these took about 3 hours to make (including bake time) so not a significant investment of time for a fun addition to the shower tomorrow.

Hopefully little baby Linden and her Mamma get a kick out of these!