Dirt Cupcakes for Kids

Dirt cupcakes are a great treat for kids and are wonderfully easy to make. Prepare dirt cupcakes for kids with help from an accomplished chef in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hi. I'm chef Amee Hoge and I teach kids and adults how to play with food. Today, we are cooking or actually going to be making some dirt cupcakes. But it's really simple. We take our favorite cake recipe, your favorite frosting recipe, you kind of put them together and then you crush some Oreo cookies, put them on top like your dirt. And then we went ahead and we're playing with fondant today. And we are going to, we made some leaves and actually I just took a butterfly pick, put this here for a little butterfly cupcake. And then over here she's playing with, this is my assistant Samantha, she's going to be playing with right here, some fondant. Fondant's like an edible Play Dough which is really fun to work with. And it allows kids to be creative while playing with food. So let me show you how to do that. We have, I'm just going to keep three Oreos. We're just going to make two cupcakes here. Three Oreos, I'm going to use my rolling pin. I kind of press down on it, get them crunched a little bit, and then I use my, I keep it in a Ziploc because it keeps the mess down. I mean I don't mind cleaning up stuff, but I'd rather not. So, I give it a good shake. Let me move that out of the way. And then the little, the frosting in there kind of gets all mushed up. You can also do, this is good for kids because sometimes they just need something to do and they want to go ahead and roll something and squish it up. I do all angles. I roll them, I flip the bag over a couple of times. That way all the crumbs get nice and crushed. Then what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and frost our cupcakes with a rubber spatula, a little rubber frosting spatula. OK. I'm going to do one. You want to do one Samantha? OK. Nothing to it. You want a nice hardy amount of frosting on there. Here's the frosting spatula. Here, if you want to go ahead and do that one. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and roll it in the dirt right here in the Oreo cookies, right in my bag. I tell kids when they cook at home, they need to learn how to clean up or their parents are not going to let them cook again. Because parents have enough to do. So this is my cookie. See it looks like, or my cupcake. And what we're going to do is let me show you, here's our cute little ladybugs. I'm going to set that on there, push in there a little bit, OK. And then what we're going to do is, let me show you. Basically all you're going to do, now fondant dries out pretty quick, ours is already starting to dry out here crumbling. What you do is you kind of use some of that, your fingers, rub it around in there. You have a little heat from your hands which will make it kind of soft. All right. Again we're playing with a little Play-Doh. Nice. All right. Beautiful, and it's dirt. We're not worrying about perfection here. Let me move that out of the way. All right. And so we've got this. You kind of make a little, you want to squish the head here a little bit, flatten it down on the back. And then, we're going to go leave it right here. And then we make a couple of eyeballs and the spots on it,, tiny, tiny, tiny pieces. OK. Press it on there. It's amazing how far that goes, just a tiny little piece of fondant. Now if it starts to dry and you're trying to put your spots on there, go ahead and dip your finger in a little bit of water, just a little bit, kind of pat it and it works like a little bit of a glue. OK. Sometimes you might have to wipe off your finger here. Like that. More spots should be good. Make sure you dry off your hands, because it does, fondant like Play Dough, it gets sort of sticky. We don't want it going all over the place. Now these are great for birthday parties, for even like a spring baby shower, all sorts of fun activities that you guys can do at home. And then actually here's our little butterfly pick. You can put that in there as well. So, there you go. Thanks for letting me teach you how to make dirt cupcakes for kids.