Yo Gabba Gabba Cupcakes

A tower of Yo Gabba Gabba cupcakes!

My fabulous, wonderful, amazing daughter Zara had a birthday last weekend and she wanted a Yo Gabba Gabba theme. Awesome. I happen to love the show and have been known to watch even when she's not around. I made her a tiny cake so she could blow out her candles at home, but needed something to feed a whole party that would be easy to transport. The situation called for cupcakes. A lot of cupcakes. Four dozen cupcakes in three different flavors and six designs. Not too much trouble. Yeah, right!

For those of you who have never heard of Yo Gabba Gabba, it's a children's television show on Nick Jr.

Left to right: Toodee, Muno, Brobee, Plex, Foofa, and DJ Lance Rock in front.

Here are the sketches for my cupcakey concepts. The only real change was the Plex cupcake. After finishing all of them (which included making silver circles for the tops), I figured they looked a bit too much like a certain part of a woman's anatomy. A robot woman's anatomy at that. That plan got scrapped, every cupcake scraped off, and redecorated. I was up til three in the morning getting them all finished. Definitely not too much trouble. Hahahahaha!

Concept sketches

The Foofa and Muno cupcakes were fresh strawberry with strawberry frosting. Get the cake recipe here. To get Muno's cupcakes so red, I cheated a little. I started with store-bought strawberry frosting and added almost a whole small tub of Wilton's No Taste Red.

Foofa cupcake

Muno cupcake

The DJ Lance Rock and Plex cupcakes were orange nutmeg. Get the recipe here. The frosting is orange flavored buttercream. The recipe for that is below. Keep scrolling down. I made the silver starburst on DJ Lance Rock's cupcake by piping grey buttercream frosting onto parchment paper wrapped around a cutting board. I stuck it in the freezer overnight and then using Wilton's Pearl Dust Luster in Silver. Follow the directions on the package. Keep the starbursts in the freezer until you're ready to decorate the cupcakes. The yellow stars are giant sprinkles.

DJ Lance Rock cupcake

Plex cupcake

The Toodee and Brobee cupcakes are Hershey's "Perfectly Chocolate" Chocolate Cake, which is my favorite chocolate cake recipe. It never fails me. The frosting is basic buttercream.

Toodee cupcake

Brobee cupcake

This week's Iron Craft challenge was quite fortuitous. We were challenged to make something green. Thank goodness Brobee is green, because with all that I had going on, there would have been no way I could have participated this week otherwise.

To clue all of the guests into what was up with all of the cupcakes I made tent card menus. Of course, with most of the guests being too young to read, I still had to explain everything dozens of times.

Menu tent card

Cupcake buffet

I had been asked recently for my buttercream frosting recipe. The one I use is a very tweaked version of Wilton's recipe. I doubled this recipe to cover all of the cupcakes and had loads left over.

Basic Buttercream Frosting

Ingredients

• 2 cups of Crisco
• 1 tsp. each of clear vanilla, almond and butter flavorings (all by Wilton)
• 14-16 tsp. water (Keep a small bowl of water nearby to add as needed. You probably will need more depending on the consistency you want.)
• 2 lbs. of Domino's confectioners' sugar
• 2 tablespoons of meringue powder (optional, but it helps stabilize the frosting)
• Pinch of salt (optional)

Directions
Cream the Crisco, flavorings, and water together. Add the dry ingredients and blend until creamy.

To flavor the orange cupcakes, I separated a cup of the frosting into a bowl and added in two teaspoons of orange emulsion. It's a lot of fun and so easy to play around with flavors. You can add practically anything to the basic recipe to come up with something unique. One of my favorite things is to add in cinnamon. The specks of cinnamon will show up, so that's not the best idea if you're using the frosting to make decorations. To get chocolate frosting, add 3/4 cup of unsweetened baking cocoa and a bit more water. So yummy!