For some reason I know an unnaturally large number of people who share February 7 as their birthday. For instance, my grandmother Kiki would have been 100 this year (and she wouldn't have let us forget it either if she had lived so long). In addition to Kiki, my boss' little son turned 7 this year (lucky 7!). As it turned out, our annual Super Bowl party also fell on that day. So my boss' son wouldn't feel like a bunch of old graduate students stole his birthday, we decided to sing to him at half time. I volunteered to make cupcakes and turned out 36 of the little treats. As I planned my treats, I realized that I just didn't want to serve up generic cupcakes but wanted to produce something a little kid would love. After one of my exhaustive google searches, I saw a picture of this alligator cupcake "cake" in which 24 cupcakes were arranged and decorated to look like a fierce(ish) alligator. Such imagination! Unfortunately, the book had been checked out of my local library and I was forced to figure it out from the pictures online.
I whipped up 24 vanilla cupcakes and then frosted them with the help of my handy pastry bag with green vanilla frosting to look like they were each covered in lizard scales. Next I bought some Keebler chocolate covered grahams and carefully cut them into little isosceles triangles for the ridges on his back. From a box of Runts candy, I fished out all the yellow banana candies to use as claws. Finally, the teeth and eyes were fashioned out of large marshmallows that I either cut to size and shape, or covered in frosting and m&m's. Lastly I arranged them as shown. In all, it took about 2 hours.
To complete the "cake" I made 12 chocolate cupcakes and topped them with vanilla frosting and silver sugar sprinkles. I melted some semisweet chocolate and used my pastry bag to pipe "Happy Birthday Harry" onto a piece of parchment paper. After a few hours in the fridge, it was hard enough to stand up on the chocolate cupcakes as in the picture below. If you do this, just make sure the chocolate is at least 1/4" thick so it doesn't fall apart.
This was my first cake for such a young kid, but it was fun to do something more whimsical than my usual fare.
