Jawa Cupcakes - Easy

Blogger JustJenn has some amazing Star Wars baking and party ideas!  (http://justjennrecipes.com/category/star-wars/)  All her stuff is very cool, but best of are all the Jawa cupcakes!  (I don't know how many people sent me the link to these! We do love Jawas!)   I decided to recreate the cupcakes for Dragon*Con 2012, and wanted to share my photos and recipes.

First, cute as her cookies were, Jenn's vegan chocolate cookie recipe didn't work for me.  The dough was way too crumbly; I could not get it to roll properly and it didn't taste right.  If you need a vegan recipe, do some searching online.  But  if you can use a recipe with real butter, that's definitely the way to go.  My rolled sugar recipe is posted in the Cookie and Frosting Recipe page linked to the side bar. I used this, but you can use your favorite rolled cookie recipe, any flavor.

I started by making my standard rolled snickerdoodle cookies, adding a fair bit of brown food coloring to the batter.  I put the dough in the fridge to chill overnight.  (Note - Jenn's cookies are much darker brown, which I like. Using a dark chocolate cookie dough is ideal for color. My kids love snickerdoodles best of all, however, so I didn't do a chocolate cookie.  The price: my Jawas' robes are a bit too light.)


In the morning, I used a box mix chocolate cake (Devil's Food) to make 2 dozen cupcakes.  Make the cupcakes kind of small - you want to minimize the crown as much as possible.  Jawa's like flat-topped cupcakes!  For fun, I used Star Wars cupcake papers from Party City.

While the cupcakes cooled, I rolled and baked the cookies.  As Jenn's blog shows, use the Star Wars jawa  cookie cutter from Williams-Sonoma, place the cookie on the baking sheet, then cut out the jawa's face.  I also dusted the cookies with a bit of cinnamon-sugar to give the robes some texture.

You'll need 24 cookies for the cupcakes.  My recipe makes several dozen, so I made the rest wookies and droids and we just ate those! (The dough was a good color for the wookies!) 

While the cookies were cooling, I made chocolate icing for the cupcake.  Jenn used a dark chocolate peanut better icing, but I wanted plain chocolate.   I used a pre-made dark chocolate icing for D*C, which looked great, but tasted lousy.  For these, I used my favorite homemade chocolate icing recipe, one from Alton Brown (Good Eats) - recipe is in the side linked page.   This icing is spectacularly yummy, but very light colored.  I was okay with that for these.  If you wanted darker icing, either use a dark chocolate recipe or else add brown coloring.

Accent the Jawa with 2 orange nonpareil or sugar eyes. Tip: use tweezers to place the eyes close together.  UUTINI!!!!