WE ARE GROOT 3


*Bunneh Test Kitchen; not for sale*

First off, let me come clean: I didn’t come up with this idea myself. Someone posted a picture on Facebook of someone else’s cupcakes, which led me to this site detailing a few other folks’ efforts. Well. Just because they did it first doesn’t mean I can’t do it, too. And with my own twist.

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I knew immediately I would use gingerbread cookies instead of dyed-brown shortbread. When I looked up photos of baby Groot, I also noticed two things right away: his pot is white, and there’s no grass. I’m a sucker for the details.

Making a stencil isn’t my style. I printed out a picture of li’l Grootie-pootie for reference, rolled out my gingerbread (the one thing in this whole process I made from a box – Betty Crocker Gingerbread Mix), and got to work with a knife.

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It was such. slow. work. But Groots were taking form! After I made about 15 or 16 of them, I was well over an hour into this project so I decided that was enough. I grabbed a couple of random cookie cutters to use up the rest of the gingerbread dough.

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I used the edge of a soup spoon to make Groot’s little smile, the connector end of an electric mixer beater to make his eyes, and the tines of a fork to do a bit of fringe on top of his head. Soon enough, I had trays of little dancing Groot cookies.

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Step one: complete! Next project: the cupcakes. He’s in a pot, so clearly I needed chocolate cupcakes to look like soil. I’ve tried a few chocolate cupcake recipes, but the one most of my tasters have raved about is the Guinness dark chocolate recipe I used at St. Patrick’s Day, so I decided to go that route again.

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These cupcakes aren’t simple, which I’d forgotten since the last time. There’s simmering and whisking and folding, and the whole thing takes some time. Finally I got those in the oven, and while they baked, I grabbed some leftover frosting from the cookies ‘n’ cream cupcakes. I needed just a little frosting to decorate the Groot cookies, so I divvied it up in mugs and added coloring.

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Note to self: buy more miniature whisks. They are useful.

While looking at 450976 movie still pictures of Groot, I noticed he had a few tiny leaves already sprouting, so those had to be included in my version as well.

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Cupcakes baked, cookies baked and decorated. Next up: frosting. Again, I wanted these to look like pots of soil just like in the movie. I made chocolate buttercream frosting (my usual recipe with 3 oz. melted/cooled unsweetened chocolate mixed in) but that just wasn’t quite good enough. I threw a bunch of Oreo cookies in a big Ziploc bag and bashed them to smithereens using our heavy metal (not as in music) ice cream scoop. Boyfriend was a little alarmed by my gusto a few times, but I wanted those cookies to be DIRT. No big chunks were allowed to remain.

Then, I dumped my Oreo dirt into the buttercream and mixed, to get it really soil-y. That’s a word. Sure.

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The upside: it looked and felt like dirt. Awesome!

The downside: I couldn’t use a decorating bag because the cookie crumbs would clog the works, and the crumbs made the frosting so thick it was difficult to spread. Oops. I laboriously smooshed “dirt” frosting onto the cupcakes with a butter knife, making a huge mess. In the end, though, I think the hassle was worth it because they did end up looking quite like little pots of soil.

And I got my army of little dancing Groot cupcakes!

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3 thoughts on “WE ARE GROOT

  • Erin

    So cute!!!! If you were going to make lots of these, I’d recommend modifying a gingerbread man cookie cutter to reduce cutting labor. Also, I find that running oreos through the food processor is a lot easier, faster, and produces more uniform crumbs than the plastic bag method 😉 I love looking at all your creations! They look soooo yummy!

    • bunneh Post author

      Haha, I thought of using the food processor – after I’d already smashed them up. I was soooo tired! 🙂 I know someone who made a custom Gromit (of Wallace and) cookie cutter… it was pretty awesome. Maybe if I feed him enough cupcakes I can talk him into making me a Groot one. 😛