Week 38: Snow People Coconut Cupcakes

Last night I decided to make something from Cupcakes! from the CakeDoctor by Anne Byrn. I had been planning on making a cheesecake cupcake from The Artful Cupcake but I just ran out of time. (Which turns out the be pretty funny considering how long it took me to make these!) We had made plans to go to visit Culpeper, VA. today because a couple of months ago there was a cool article about some of the shops there, and we had the day off. It's about 70 miles from where we live. It was pretty cool but some of the shops were...unfortunately...closed on Mondays. What's up with that? N E waz...we had lunch at this cool diner called Frost Cafe and the cheeseburgers were awesome...as was the chocolate malt. We have a Silver Diner here in our area, but Frost Cafe was a million times better! All three of us had cheeseburgers and fries and onion rings (we shared all the fried stuff).

I made the first stage of the cupcakes when I got up this morning at 7:00 a.m. with Layla. I decided on what the CakeDoctor calls Snowmen Cupcakes but I call SnowPeople Cupcakes because they all look different to me...some like ladies and some like men. Before we left on our outing, I hid the cupcakes in my office so that no one (including Layla) would eat any before I got back...they would do that even without frosting! Guys! On the way back home we stopped at the Giant so that I could pick up a few decorating items for the snowpeople...like spicettes, fruit rollups, etc. Got home around 4:00 and made the buttercream frosting...which I'm becoming a pro at...it's the easiest thing to make...and I frosted the lovely vanilla cupcakes and then rolled the top on them in shredded coconut. YUM! Then the production of the snowpeople began with the marshmallows. Luckily, I had a lot of the little items the CakeDoctor calls for to use for the eyes and mouths....chocolate sprinkles...but I soon grew tired of chocolate sprinkles and began to get crazily creative with dots, and other fun things I had.

This part of the decorating took a loooooong time to do 24 cupcakes...like about 5 hours total. You have to cut things, roll things, poke holes in things, give them eyes, glue things to other things and basically assemble a snowperson with some personality! You can't have them just looking like robots, you know? Soon, I had a french dude, a crazy guy with black teeth, some old ladies in red hats, and I even called one couple Mr and Mrs Smith. They look pretty much like a group of folks on a bus, don't you think? I wanted to give one a tie but I couldn't figure out how to do it...which reminds me...over the holidays at an office party some one mentioned to me that someone else in our office was doing a blog. His is about ties! He wears a cool tie every day and takes photos of them each day and explains a bit about them on his blog. I checked it and it's pretty cool. Also, a note about the pancake cupcakes....someone wrote to me and said that I should put the photo with the bacon on the flickr group that is called bacon...pretty funny..and so I did. Who knew they would have a group about bacon??? And, yes, cupcakeluv....these cupcakes will be in the office tomorrow morning!

To download the recipe...click here! You can see more of the SnowPeople on my flickr site at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cupcakequeen.