Oscar the Grouch Cupcake

A few months ago, I made an Elmo Cupcake for my Mom’s birthday. With my Dad’s birthday coming up, I decided to follow the same theme and make him a cupcake that I felt would best represent him. He’s a pretty strict guy so immediately I thought of Oscar the Grouch.

I tried to search the internet for good examples of Oscar the Grouch cupcakes but unfortunately, he’s not as popular as Elmo so there weren’t that many examples to reference. The ones that I were able to find looked…. really derpy… O_O Not exactly the look I was going for. I know most of the cupcakes I found had Oscar looking really happy with its mouth open but I wanted to portray his angry, grouchy look in this cupcake as my dad can be pretty grouchy at times. As a result, I decided to not give him a smile. Making him was pretty easy, as i’ll highlight in the steps below.

First, start off with a cupcake base of your choice. With leftover cake batter from making our Decadent Chocolate Cake, I decided to make a few extra cupcakes with it for this special occasion. Since Oscar lives in a garbage can, and I didn’t have silver/aluminum foil cupcake liners, I decided to make my own using tin foil. Pretty ghetto but I tried to be as resourceful as possible.

Take some tin foil and with the shiny side out (or in, it’s up to you), wrap it around your cupcake leaving extra space at the top so you can tuck it in later to make it look a bit neater. Cut off the excess tin foil at the bottom, just enough so that you can fold it into the bottom so that it neatly moulds the cupcake liner. I also cut some slits on the bottom foil so that it folded in a lot easier.

Tuck in the excess foil at the top so you have a neater rim. Now this is starting to look more like a (clean) garbage can!

I can start piping Oscar’s fur now using the #233 grass piping tip.

For the eyes, I used white chocolate wafers and chocolate chips. I melted the bottom of the chocolate chips so it adhered better to the white chocolate wafer. I also proceeded to add the brows and piped them on using the Ateco #30 tip.