Sesame Street Cupcakes

I made two batches of these cupcakes for birthday parties. They were a whole lot of fun to make but rather labor intensive. After about six hours, these cupcakes turned into a labor of love. I was listening to my local top 40 radio station as I was working on them, and I now feel I have a firm grasp of the hits of the moment. I can even sing along to some without flubbing the lyrics.

I used Billy's Vanilla Cupcakes for the base and frosted them with a cream cheese butter cream blend. The embellishments are made of marshmallow fondant, colored and sculpted to resemble the appropriate facial features.

When I was planning these cupcakes, I was concerned about achieving the vibrant colors of the Sesame Street characters. I didn't want the frosting to have any sort of artificial, food coloring taste to it, so I had to be thoughtful about how I was going to get the colors just right. I did my research on the different gel colors out there and decided that Wilton was the way to go. I decided to make the frosting a day in advance to give it time to develop in the fridge. Frosting will darken in color if you allow it to sit for about twenty-four hours.

I used a half butter, half cream cheese blend for the frosting. I chose to use a partial cream cheese base so that the frosting would hold the vibrant Sesame Street colors and appear shiny after it set. I parceled out the frosting into four batches and mixed the colors, adding a bit of gel color at a time until the color was the right vibrancy. For the Elmo red, I used Wilton's No Taste Red gel coloring which I would recommend for any deep red frosting. Regular reds tend to leave an aftertaste, and you have to use a great deal of color to get a vibrant red. 

The fondant embellishments can be made several days in advance and stored in the fridge. One batch of marshmallow fondant is more than enough to create the parts needed to assemble these cupcakes. I prefer marshmallow fondant to the store-bought alternatives simply because it tastes so much better.

I will post the marshmallow fondant recipe this week for those of you wanting to try it out. It is an amazingly simple recipe but requires that you either have a dough hook attachment on your mixer or are willing to get a bit messy. I like to do the messy option because I can judge the consistency of my end product better than if I were using my mixer to blend it all together.