Shark and Life Saver Cupcakes

Hello everyone. This is my easy way to make some cute shark cupcakes. Every year I watch shark week on the discovery channel and its one of my absolute favorite weeks in the year. I don’t know why, but I have a shark appreciation. Although I would normally make every ingredient from scratch, I think it’s a lot easier to show you all how to make these with some pre-made ingredients.

I bought these pre-made ingredients from the store.

Materials I bought:

1. Two small containers of any flavor white colored frosting
2. One box of cake mix
3. One box of Twinkies
4. One small package of Oreos
5. One small box of mini powder sugar coated donuts
6. Blue and Black food coloring
7. Red fruit leather

In addition to the above materials I had these extras on hand:

1. Cupcake liners
2. Small plastic storage bags
3. Cupcake pan
4. Cooling cage rack

This step is really simple. I planned on making a dozen cupcakes, half to have the sharks and the other half to have the Life Saver rafts. Unwrap all six of the Twinkies, cut them diagonally on only one end so the sharks look like they are coming out of the water, and take two Oreo’s, split each one in half and scrape the filling out. Once you have the four cookies, lay them on the counter and cut each one in half. Take the halves and push them into the tops of the Twinkies. These are the fins of our sharks!

I took the two containers of frosting and combined them in a bowl, than split the frosting into four parts, but not equal. Take about two separate half cups of frosting and reserve each in small storage bags. The two parts that are left are than equally parted and are for the blue “water” and the gray “sharks”. Color one part blue with the blue food coloring and the other part gray with just a few small droplets of black food coloring.

Next I took the boxed cake mix and followed the manufacturers instructions. Take the cupcakes and ice them with the blue “water” frosting and set aside. Take the gray frosting and heat it in the microwave for about 30 second or until it is warm and slightly runny in texture. Place the Oreo topped Twinkies onto a cooling cage rack. Next glaze the Twinkies with the warm gray frosting and let cool in the freezer for a few minutes, Repeat glaze with the parts that didn’t get glazed in the initial glaze process.

I then took the two small storage bags with the frostings, colored one black and left the other one white. I cut a tiny hole at the tip of the bottom of each of the bags.

For the red fruit leather, cut some into long strips, for the Life Savers, and some into crescent like shapes, for the shark mouths. Take the long strips and carefully wrap three around the six mini donuts. Than take the crescent shapes and place them on the front, non-diagonally cut part of the shark. I took the white frosting bag and piped “teeth” over the crescent mouth shapes. Next grab the other black frosting bag and pipe on the details of the shark’s eyes and gills.

Next I placed the Life Savers with the cut out red fruit leather on top of six of the cupcakes and than placed each of the sharks on top of the other six, you may have to take a fork and press some of the blue frosting up against the seams of the bottom of the sharks to make it look more realistic.

Thank you everyone for reading this and I hope you try this at home, I know I had a lot of fun making and eating these.