Lemur Cupcakes

Pretty much everyone who has met our son in the last 2½ years has also met Lemur.  Lemur is his best friend, son, and often, named as the 4th member of our family.  His little cousins know Lemur.  His big cousins know Lemur.  Our priest knows Lemur.  Lemur is very well known in our circles.  Lemur made our latest adoption profile 7 times, more than anyone besides the 3 human members of our family. 

So when it came time to discuss Luke's birthday cupcake flavor, and he picked the same strawberry cupcakes he had last year (which we loved!), we thought maybe we should try something new.  And then I remembered this pin (I can't find any further source!) I had saved months earlier.  I showed Luke.  He loved it and then instantly forgot about it.  Which was convenient for me because then these got to be a bit of a surprise.

You can use any cupcake base and any white frosting (I'm going to recommend these from my friend Monica but store-bought works too!  Or another recipe!).  That makes these super easy to make and frost (no piping needed!). 

I didn't have any details for the ones I saw on Pinterest but Matt and I stared at them for quite a bit and decided to go with mini Oreos, M&Ms, and black frosting.

I had M&Ms in the freezer (for these cookies), then bought a can of mini Oreos and a small tube of black frosting from Target.  Total extra spent: $3.

(You COULD try to make your own black frosting but I remember watching my sister try to decorate an Elmo cake for her kid's birthday years ago and it didn't go well.  Making the frosting dark enough kept making it too thin.  Then thickening it made it too light.  So $2 of store-bought frosting was an easy and cheap solution and, again, no piping bag to clean out!)
 
I scraped the frosting off the Oreos but you can see I wasn't super picky about it.  That just seemed like a waste of time to get off every bit of white frosting when I was going to be adding frosting to half of them anyways for the eyes.  Priorities (while watching me, Luke informed me that Lemur's ears were grey and not black.  If only they made grey mini Oreos...he would have been happier).

I tried to convince Luke I needed to use Lemur as a model but apparently, Lemur didn't want to be a photo prop and I got this one about half a second before he was grabbed off the table and hidden.  Although later Lemur was perfectly happy to have us eat recreations of his face so Lemur has strange priorities.

The frosting and decorating only took about 15 minutes, making these the easiest cupcakes I've made for Luke's birthday yet.  And maybe the ones he liked the most?  Pretty much anything involving Lemur is his favorite.

It was fun to incorporate Luke's favorite "thing" as part of his birthday celebrations (besides Lemur also attending his party...because obviously that happened too).  Someday he will outgrow taking Lemur EVERYWHERE and talking about him constantly and I know I'll look back fondly on these days where I was referred to as "Grandma" on a regular basis (because...Lemur has a voice, obviously) and Lemur could make almost everything better.  He's only little for so long!