Owl Cupcakes

One of Ben’s coworkers LOVES owls.   She collects all kinds of owl stuff, and as soon as I saw these cupcakes in my Hello, Cupcake book, I knew I had to make them for her.  Last month was her birthday, so it was the perfect opportunity!  Unfortunately, Ben didn’t tell me it was her birthday until the night before so I didn’t have time to make them for the actual day.  Then, I started working crazy shifts and before I knew it, it was a whole month later and I still hadn’t made the cupcakes!  I decided it was just time, so on my day off I made it happen.  They weren’t difficult to make, just a bit time consuming.  Glad I finally got around to making them.  So, happy (very belated) birthday Elizabeth!

Supplies Needed: (not all pictured above)
1 batch of Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolate cupcakes – 12 regular and 24 minis
1 package regular Oreos
1 package mini Oreos
1-2 cans store-bought chocolate frosting
1 can store-bought vanilla frosting
1 package Runts
1 package Junior Mints
1 large bag M&Ms
 

You will need enough Oreos with icing to make a pair of eyes for each cupcake (so 24 big Oreos and 48 minis).  Probably the most time consuming part of the whole thing was prepping all the Oreos.  The easiest way to get separate them while keeping all of the filling on one side was to use a butter knife to split them.  I scraped over the top of the filling to remove some of the extra crumbs as best I could.  

Using the other half of the Oreo (without the icing), cut out the shapes for the ears.  For the mini Oreos, just cut them in half.  For the large Oreos, cut each cookie into thirds and use the rounded pieces for ears.  Take note, it is really hard to cut Oreos without shattering them.  You will probably need some extras to have enough unbroken pieces.  It’s okay if they break a little bit though, they will be covered in frosting so they don’t need to look perfect.  

From here on out, it’s smooth sailing.  Frost the cupcakes using store-bought frosting.  Use a nice thick coat so all the cookies and candy will stick to it well.  

This is the fun part!  For the baby owls, use the iced mini Oreos you prepped to make the eyeballs, the cut mini Oreos to be the ears, and yellow M&Ms to be the beaks.  

Do the same for the full-size cupcakes, except use banana Runts as the beaks.  

I didn’t take pictures of the final steps, but basically, use a pastry bag fitted with a small round tip and filled with vanilla frosting to pipe a small dot of frosting onto each “eyeball”.  Press on M&Ms for the pupils of the baby owls and Junior Mints for the big owls.  (Placing the pupils in different parts of the eyes to make them appear to be looking different directions gives them so much expression!)

Then, using another pastry bag fitted with a V-shaped tip and filled with chocolate frosting, pipe frosting over the ear cookie pieces.  Pipe feathers on the edges of the top half of each cupcake (just underneath the cookies eyeballs) to make your owls cute and fluffy.  That’s it!

Amazingly, even though I bought a full-size bag of M&Ms, I did not have enough brown ones to use as pupils for all the baby owls.  So I decided to branch out and give some of them blue and green eyes – and I thought they looked SUPER cute that way!

Source: adapted from Hello, Cupcake by Alan Richardson and Karen Tack