Rilakkuma Oatmeal Cups

Aren’t these cute? This is my second try baking at home. I decorated my oatmeal cups with Rilakkuma faces, a super cute Japanese character! Last week, I baked shortbread cookies with some icing. That was a good try for the first time in a long time, but I wanted to keep practicing my decorating skills.

This week, I wanted to make something a bit more nutritious than cookies. Oatmeal cups, PLUS icing (Sort of healthy, right? (-_-;)) The oatmeal cup recipe was adopted from Yummiest Food and the icing recipe was adopted from Allrecipes. Oatmeal is a great source of vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants, and I think my husband and I can eat more of it.

This oatmeal cup recipe only requires 7 ingredients and all ingredients are common household grocery items.

Oatmeal Cup

• 1 cup fresh blueberries
• 2 eggs
• 2 cup oats
• 2 bananas, medium ripe
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

The original recipe said 1 cup of brown sugar, but I reduced the amount to ¼ cup considering adding icing at the end and the bananas I had were very ripe. This decision turned out to be a good one because the final oatmeal cups were plenty sweet.

I also used quick oats instead of rolled oats. The final outcome was just fine.

Icing

• 2 tsp Corn syrup, light
• 1/4 tsp Almond extract
• 1 cup Confectioners’ sugar
• Food colorings (green, blue, red, yellow, black)
• 2 – 4 tsp Milk

This icing recipe is the same one as I used last week. The last time the icing came out much harder than I wanted, so I added a small amount of milk (¼ teaspoon or so) at a time to adjust the consistency.

For decorating the oatmeal cups with Rilakkuma face, I made:

• Light brown icing – face
• White icing – mouth area
• Black icing – eyes, nose and mouth
• Yellow icing – ears

To make light brown color, I slowly mixed red, yellow, and a tiny bit of blue gel food colorings.

The black icing was tricky. I bought black food coloring and added quite a bit of it in the icing, but the icing stayed light gray and was not anywhere close to be black. So I added some blue, red, and green to get a deeper color. I guess I could’ve kept adding black food coloring too, but I was concerned how much food coloring I’d be consuming at this point (could this be toxic by now?) The color mixture turned out to be kind of dark purple-ish gray, but was later on darkened itself to look more like black.

Summary

Overall, I’m happy with how my oatmeal cups have turned out. They were not only tasty but so cute to look at. The black icing was a challenge this time, and I’ll definitely find out the best way to make rich black icing in the future!