Vanilla Rabbit Hole Cupcakes

Few words invoke my creative juices quite like, "Will you bring dessert?"  Of course, the answer is always yes.  I begin giddy with excitement, poring over my cookbooks for just the perfect confection for the occasion.  The flip side is that this excitement usually turns to sheer panic as I find myself covered in frosting and short just three more candy canes at the eleventh hour.  Alas, dessert is a labor of love and goodness knows, I'm smitten.

Last month, I took on the challenge of Easter dessert, deciding to put my cake decorating chops to the test with the "Rabbit Hole Cupcakes" featured in Karen Tack & Alan Richardson's Hello, Cupcake! They're cute, whimsical, and I figured I could cut the cost often associated with the very specialized candies needed to make many of these cupcake designs work.  I also chose to bake my own cupcakes from scratch, rather than from the box, using the "Vanilla Cupcakes" recipe from the same cookbook.



Fixins:
Vanilla Cupcakes

• 2.5 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• .5 tsp baking soda
• .5 tsp salt
• .5 cup milk
• .5 cup vegetable oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 stick unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 large eggs

Rabbit Holes

• 24 vanilla cupcakes in green liners
• 1 cup chocolate frosting
• .5 cup Oreo cookie crumbs
• 2 cans vanilla frosting
• Red, blue, green & yellow food coloring
• Assorted candy eggs

Starting with the cupcakes, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Stir the first four dry ingredients together.  In a separate measuring container, mix the milk, vegetable oil, and vanilla.  In yet another container, cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy.  Add the eggs one at a time to the mixture and mix until combined, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary.  Next, alternate adding dry and wet ingredients, beating after each addition.  Don't overmix.  I used my disher (fancy ice cream scoop) to scoop the finished batter into a muffin tin prepped with paper liners.  Bake the cupcake 15-20 minutes or until golden.  Cool on a wire rack until room temperature.

To decorate the cupcakes, begin with the brown "dirt" cupcakes.  Spread chocolate icing on four of the cupcakes, then dip the cupcake into a shallow bowl of Oreo crumbs to coat.  Divide the vanilla frosting into five separate bowls - 1 cup in each of the first two bowls, then .5 cup in each of the three remaining bowls.  There should be about .5 cup of frosting left, which you can put directly into a piping bag.  Using a small round tip, pipe on the rabbit feet and tails.  Place some chocolate frosting in a piping bag and use this to pipe on the pads of the feet.

Using the green and the yellow food coloring, create one light green and one dark green out of the 1-cup bowls of frosting.  Scoop the light and dark greens onto opposite sides of the same pastry bag, then pipe on to the remaining cupcakes with a squeeze-and-pull motion to result in grass.  I started on the outside of the cupcake and worked in so that the tips of the "grass" would lay on top of the outer layers.  Dye each of the remaining bowls of frosting a different color - pink, blue, and yellow.  Place these in separate piping bags and pipe on small flowers onto the "grass" cupcakes.  Top some of these cupcakes with the candy eggs.

The Result:

Now aren't those precious?!  These cupcakes were what I had hoped they would be - cute, funny, and oh-so-yummy!  The "grass" cupcakes took a while to decorate, and at about 11:30pm I gave up, anticipating an early morning.  A word of warning - don't start the baking process at 8pm...I know.  I'm such a master planner.  Also, I was pretty generous with the batter, which made nice round cupcakes, but it also did not produce 24 cupcakes as the recipe specifies.  That was okay, because I didn't have the stamina to decorate all 24 anyway.

Repeat:

Sure.  These are special occasion cupcakes, and their application is somewhat limited, but they required just a few supplies and resulted in a really fun product.  I'd give them another go, even if only to try and get the tint right on the grass.  Frickin' grass.