Having fun with cooking and eating: Easy Minion Cupcakes

I recently co-hosted a minion-themed baby shower, and I knew as soon as I saw them that I wanted to make Despicable Me cupcakes using Twinkies. I'm not much of a baker, so I relied on cake mix but made the frosting from scratch. And of course, I bought the Twinkies -- which btw, are readily available even though they were briefly discontinued in 2013. In fact, the packaging here called it "The Sweetest Comeback in the History of Ever"

Here is the list of things I used:

I also made my own buttercream frosting using a recipe similar to this one.

The steps were easy, but required some advanced planning.

Assemble the Minion heads

Cut each of the cupcakes in half using a serrated knife (I used a bread knife). Some other blogs mentioned freezing the Twinkies in advance to make them easier to cut -- this isn't necessary.
Draw faces on the little dudes. Take your time, and have fun with it.
- Start with the eyes: To create a glasses-like effect, squeeze generous dots of black frosting where you want the eyes to be, then press the eyes into those dots. The eyes will spread out the black frosting underneath and create a glasses-like effect.
- Finish by adding glasses frames and variety of mouths
- I noticed a little bleeding of the black color into the Twinkies, but in the end it wasn't too noticeable.

I bought black cookie frosting for a few reasons, including that it would harden nicely, and also that black frosting is hard to get right. One great thing about this product is that it hardens after 4 hours -- another reason to do this step ahead of time.

You can do these ahead of time and store them (unrefrigerated) in an air-tight container. If you're strapped for time, you don't need to wait for the black frosting to harden -- just take extra care when handling. I had to transport my cupcakes to the shower location, so it was nice to know that everything was hardened.

Bake Cupcakes and make frosting

Nothing too interesting here -- just bake the cupcakes according to the directions on the box, and using the blue foil cupcake liners. Full sized cupcakes are the right size for the Twinkie heads, even though I read that comeback Twinkies are smaller than the originals were!

I'd debated about using food coloring to create blue frosting, but decided to stick with white, which turned out just fine. You can make your own frosting or use the store-bought variety -- either works just fine.

Assemble the Minions

I piped the frosting onto each cupcake, leaving the edges bare (perhaps a little too bare), then simply pushed one of the prepared minion heads onto the cupcake.