alien cupcakes

A lot of people have been asking me about how I made the alien cupcakes for Sean's party. Here's a secret... they were REALLY easy! ;)
At first I started out with 2 boxes of cake mix. I followed the directions and made cake batter. See, I told you this was easy. One of the cake mixes was funfetti, and in true Erica fashion I put in some green & yellow food coloring to make the batter green (the other cake was chocolate so I couldn't really dye that!). Then I lined the cupcake pans and filled them using a 1/4 c. measuring cup. I baked for the allotted time and then took them out to cool. Easy, I tell ya ;)

While they were baking I made the icing. And by made the icing I mean scoop it out of the container and put it in a bowl so I can put food coloring in it. I use this kind of icing. I recommend buying the neon pack of food coloring, but I couldn't find it anywhere so I had to mix a little yellow with the green to get it to look the way I wanted (and it still really wasn't as neon green as I would have liked). If you're wondering specifics, I used 2 large cans of icing, 26 drops of green & 9 drops of yellow :)

Being the baking expert that I am, I then put my icing into a ziplock bag to ice the cupcakes. I had read a tip on someone's blog (but I can't for the life of me remember where) to put the ziplock back in a large cup or jar (I used a jar) and then fold the top around the sides. Then fill it that way. After all these years of making a HUGE mess while trying to get the icing in the ziplock bag, I am now SO excited to have found a way that isn't messy! ha! I then cut a small piece of the corner of the bag off and iced my cupcakes. See... still easy, right?

I found the idea to make the cupcakes here. But after realizing I don't even know where I would buy a leaf shaped fondant cutter & exactly how many mentos it would take to put 3 eyes on 48 cupcakes (not to mention how nasty a mentos would taste on a cupcake), I decided I would have to revamp the recipe. So here's the Erica Version:

~Buy a bag of mini-marshmallows. Cut them in half and place 3 of them on a cupcake for the eyes, cut/sticky side down.
(please excuse the quality of the next two photos- I forgot my camera at my friends house so I have no step by step pictures and these 2 were taken off of my phone!)

~Get some of the green apple sour ring candies & cut them into quarters. Use 2 of the cut pieces as the ears.
~Look everywhere for green apple sour punch straws. If you can't find them, buy these candies & then cut the green ones into strips. Place 1 strip on top of the head as an antennae.
~Eat the red ones from the package
~Look everywhere for black gel icing. If you can't find it (are we seeing a pattern here?), buy chocolate icing. Put icing in a sandwich sized ziplock bag and cut a very tiny part of the corner off.
~Use the icing to put dots on the eyes & draw mouths. I made 3 different kinds of mouths, just because I like variety.
~That's it! (see, I promised it was easy!)

And here is a MUCH better picture of the cupcakes! They were a big hit & a lot of fun!!

Oh yeah, and if you have to run to the grocery store before the party (that's in the desert in the summer), make sure you take the cupcakes out of your trunk. Otherwise you may have to put them in the freezer so they will stop melting.... but I don't know anyone who would do that ;)