Monster Cakes

I have managed to get myself all inspired by my friend over at Running Away? I'll Help You Pack.
She is always so good at decorating cakes for a theme. Usually just a made up idea that looks so simple and easy to complete.
Ben's class have just been studying animatronics (robots and how they are made).
At the end of the study block they decided to have a shared lunch in the class. All the kids were to bring something that was monster themed to complete their study block on this subject.
Ben wanted cakes....!

The teacher sent home a flier with details and on there was a picture of some of the monsters from Monsters Inc (the movie)
This got us thinking....so we ended up with Wazowski Cakes, after Mike Wazowski from the movie Monsters Inc

Now I have not be a big user of food colouring for quite a while, so this was quite an experience for me to use it again. In fact I was amazed at exactly how much I needed to use to achieve the desired effect.
Right from the beginning let me tell you that I cheated....yep I am a busy mum and I was happy to help my son out but there was not going to be any heroic moments of me staying up till midnight to make his class 20 cupcakes all decorated as Wazowski!
So I used a boxed cake mix to make the cakes! There I said it, I didn't make the cakes from scratch. And to push it even further I used the frosting that came in the box to decorate the cakes as well. I know I can hear the cooking gods turning as we speak.

Yes that is blue cake mixture. I decided that if it was monster cakes we were making then they had to be weird as well. So they had blue cake and green icing. It actually turned out ok.
I then turned the frosting green and decorated the cakes with white choc buttons and used icing pens to achieve the fine detail.

Ben loved them and at the end of the day that was all that really mattered.
They didn't last long in the class lunch either, so kids were obviously not put off by green frosting.