a non expert elmo cupcake tutorial

I debated showing you these cupcakes. I am pretty sure they look like my two year decorated them! But I had fun and have never attempted anything like this before. Unfortunately, they didn't taste that great but I figured a class full of 1-2 year olds would not be snobs when it comes to the taste of their sugar (I was right). Regardless of what the back of the food color box says, you can not get white frosting red. A very shocking pink but not red, even with half a bottle. So I had to use pre-made red decorators frosting that was in a tube. I think it is supposed to be used sparingly like with a flower not the entire cake. This stuff tasted bad. If I had had my act together I could have gotten a better food color dye at the craft store.

I could not find a good tutorial actually explaining how to decorate an elmo onto cupcakes, just pictures on Flickr(here, here, here, here). Here is my first time, non-cake decorator attempt that you should take with a grain of salt:

• Split oreos in half scrape out cream. Carefully cut each oreo side in half. Place the un-creamed side down (I did some with the un-cream side up but I didn't like them as much) onto the cupcake for elmo's mouth. Use a bit of frosting to help it stay put.
  
• I then used the star tip and the leaf tip to get elmo's hair. After a few I got the hang of it and I think the star tip works the best if you drag it up higher. I thought the dragging the leaf tip up looked like hair at first but really it looks like it melted all over.
  
• Place hair all around the oreo mouth. I put more hair around the oreo mouth than up where the eyes would go.
• Use a writing/piping tip to place two big whites of eyes very close together.
• Use a writing/piping tip to place a big orange nose right underneath the two eyes.
• Finally, use black frosting to put in the pupils with a small writing/piping tip.