My daughter is going through a phase of sending me cute images and I have to send her ones she'll like back. In the process of finding me a cute Elmo (I'm a sucker for Elmo) she found this photo:
And decided we needed to make cookie monster cakes. So being the lovely mum I am i got the ingredients together to give it a go. I made my muffins, but you could easily buy them and I bought my cookies but I could easily make my own in future and probably would if I had more time.
Now the major difference between the above cookie monster and my cookie monster is the fur. My husband is allergic to coconut so when I found this
recipe video for cookie monster I was dismayed to find him covered in coconut, not for me and the Boo, we love coconut but for poor old Daddy. So we decided to do ours purely with blue icing.
So here's what you'll need.
6 muffins
6 cookies (or more incase of breakages)
12 white malteasers
black writing icing
blue butter icing (recipe following)
An icing bag.
Okay, so first you need to bake your muffins, here's the recipe:
- 2 cups plain flour, sifted
- ½ cup caster sugar
- 1 Tbsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 cup milk
- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 1 large egg (or 2 medium)
- 1/2 cup butter or margarine or a combo of both.
Preheat your oven to gas 6.
firstly, melt your butter/marg in a macrowave or in a pan. You need to do this first so it can cool down whilst you prepare the other ingredients.
Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl, set aside.
In another bowl whisk egg 'til combined and then add the sugar, milk and vanilla. Once this is done, start to add the butter a little at a time, stirring after every addition until it's all mixed in. Make sure your butter is cooled before doing this or you'll end up with scrambled egg!
Now add the liquid mix to the dry ingredients and mix until *JUST* combined. This is very improtant. You want lumps, you might even see a bit if un mixed flour in there, it doesn't matter. If you over work your mufffin mix your muffins will be hard and not muffinly good.
Now put your miffin mix into a muffin tray, either grease it well or use liners. I got 6 muffins plus one extra cake. You want to fill the muffin cases quite generously as you want them to rise up quite high over the edge of your liner.
get your muffins in the oven and bake for around 15-20 mins. check with a skewer to see if cooked through, the skewer will come out clean if the cake is cooked. leave muffins to cool (on a wire rack if possible)
Of course, this muffin is adaptable and you could add flavourings, chocolate chips, blueberries or whatever you liked if you wanted too.
Now we need to prepare our butter cream .
Ingredients:
1/4 cup softened butter
1-2 tsp milk
1tsp vanilla extract
Approximately 1 -11/2 cups icing sugar sieved.
You need softened butter for this, the softer the better. Place it in a big bowl and stir it around a bit until it's really soft and malleable. Add in the vanilla, the milk and about 1/2 cup of icing sugar to start. make sure you sieve it in so you don't get lumps. Keep adding icing sugar until you get to a stage where your buttercream is making soft peaks (so when you pull your spoon up it stands in a peak but flops a bit) and make sure to taste it to check it is sweet enough. If you need to add more sugar to sweeten and it goes too thick simply add a drop more milk.
Now you can add your blue colour. I went a *leeetle* OTT with mine. I say start witn 4-5 drops, stir then add more until you get a colour you are happy with. Depending on your blue colouring this could take quite alot to achieve perfect cookie monster colouring.
Okay, now get your icing bag and pour your buttercream into it. I used a fluted nozzle on mine but you could use a rolled up piece of greaseproof paper with the corner snipped off, that'd work too I am sure or simply slather the icing on and use a fork to fluff him up!
So I dotted the icing all over my muffin, just leaving little splodges all over until he looked nice and shaggy. Then I let my daughter do the rest so....well, they're a little more flowing and organic shall we say. They still look good though, so it just proves there are lots of approaches to making a shaggy cookie monster.
Right, now get your cookies and cut about a third of it off so the cookie will fit in the monsters mouth. When this is done cut into the side of the muffin just above the liner line and take it about half way through the muffin. Now insert your cookie into the slit.
T o finish put two white malteasers (or white chocolate buttons on top of his head and use some black writing icing to draw on his little pupils. And you will then have something that looks vaguely like this:
He's kinda cute isn't he? Here's the photo of a whole herd of monsters. Yes, I made 6, but one poor moster met with a messy end, so the photo only shows 5!
