Hungry Hungry Hippos

     Time for another cupcake recipe! This time, I've got my eyes set on these crazy simple (yet super adorable) hippos which are part of a whole jungle themed design by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson.

Ingredients include:

• Vanilla Cupcakes
• Blue Decorating Sugar
• 1 Can Vanilla Frosting
• Nutter Butters
• Mini Chocolate Chips
• Orange Froot Loops

     For these little guys, there are only 3 simple steps.

     First, you must "Place the blue sugar in a small shallow bowl" (Tack and Richardson 79). You are then to set aside some of the vanilla frosting into a ziplock bag and tint the rest of the icing into a deep shade of blue using food coloring. You must then spread this on top of the cupcakes and roll the edges in the blue sprinkles. Lastly, to form the hippo heads, you are to press a cookie into the frosting of each cupcake allowing one third of the cookie to hang over the edge, and use the bagged icing as glue to add the hippos chocolate and cereal features (Tack and Richardson 79). 

Hey, that's pretty good.

     Easy right? Nothing too crazy with these steps at all. To make matters even better, these authors have written tips to help you with almost every aspect of their recipes. For example, they can take you step by step on how to roll your cupcakes in decorating sugar, use a ziplock bag to pipe designs, or even just on how to frost a cupcake. All of these tips are created to help us, the students, achieve the best possible outcome, which is an aspect I've come to love about these authors and their book.

I made these hippos for my 1-1/2 year old cousin to enjoy. Who would you gift these cupcakes to?

Tack, Karen and Alan Richardson. What's New, Cupcake?. New York, New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Boston 2010.