Almost Unschoolers: Cookie Monster Cupcakes

After a week or so of making paint, and playdough with Kool-Aid, cooking wool dye on the stove, and making crayons in our cake pans, the children suggested, that it might be fun to make something in our kitchen we could actually eat. It was a novel idea, but it just so happened that I'd been thinking about this cupcake recipe, I'd seen floating around the Web, for a while now.

The most perfect example I've seen of how this recipe can turn out is at www.goodthingscatered.blogspot.com/2009/04/cookie-monster-cupcakes.html. I knew ours wouldn't be anywhere near as cute, but that's never stopped us from plunging into a project before. Besides, the children aren't all that picky about their cupcake design.

The kids broke apart twelve chocolate sandwich cookies, and placed them in the bottom of lined muffin pans. The oldest two set about mixing up a Betty Crocker chocolate cake batter, while I added a few drops of blue food coloring to a bowl of sugar (I did this right away, because I was using a liquid food coloring. This allowed it time to dry, and then we stirred it to break up the clumps).

The batter was poured on top of the cookies, in the muffin cups, and then baked as usual. Once they were done, and cooled, we added a blue tinted butter cream frosting. I wanted to add the cookie crumb and cream filling like the recipe on Good Things Catered, but we didn't get the cookie crumbs quite fine enough, and so exploded our pastry bag while trying to squeeze out the filling.