Minion Cupcakes

 My four year old will be five on Thursday. He wanted to take treats to preschool for his birthday, but this week the school is only in session today because the teachers are going to attend a conference.  So we took the treats today.

I was inspired by pinterest.  There are some pretty cute minion cupcakes out there.  I should have looked at the pictures one more time before going to the store because I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by buying smarties candies for the eyes.  Oh well.  Frosting works too.

I nearly had a problem though.  The store was out of Twinkies.  I ended up with the Hostess version called Cloud Cakes.
 

I splurged for those little tubes of writing gel - which are crazy expensive.  Our elevation is so high that when I opened them, the gel just started shooting out and wasted a good bit of it.  I should have bought more black than I did because I ran out before I could get all the goggle frames done.

I used blue instead (since it was midnight and there isn't anything open at that hour here).  I bought some black string licorice intending to make little spiked hair on some of them, but after leaving them out overnight, they were a little hard and too dried out to poke into without messing up their frosted faces. I would have done them all this morning but we had a homeschool class here so I had to get part of it done last night.   I would definitely recommend assembling these all right before you need them.  Real Twinkies might be better, but these cloud cakes dried out pretty bad.

I put them on the cupcakes today - on a pillow of yellow frosting.  Most of the pictures online put them on blue, because that's the color of their overalls, but I thought yellow was more fitting.  The blue ones look to me like they're swimming.

 For the frosting, I mixed together one and a half containers of store brand vanilla frosting, and an 8 ounce tub of whipped cream, and some yellow food coloring.  It makes the best frosting ever.

It was a little too soft though, so I stuck the frosted cupcakes in the fridge, topped them with the minions and left them to chill until it was time to go to preschool.

 My son is very picky about foods being combined (it's a texture thing related to his autism) so I also sent one plain cupcake with no frosting or anything on it just in case he didn't want a minion.  I bet the rest of the class will like them though. :)

We'll do cake and presents on his real birthday too, but I wanted him to have a chance to share the day with his friends at preschool too.