I’ve made a lot of birthday cakes, for which I’m very grateful as it’s not only fun, but also means The Offspring is growing up and thus surviving. This year, when asked what he wanted on the cake, he shrugged and grunted as teens are wont to do, and so I made the executive decision to do something I’d wanted to do for years: Among Us cupcakes.

Originally I was only going to make dead crewmates, but I realized that would be A) super morbid for a birthday and B) rather confusing for anyone not well acquainted with the game. (Mostly B, if we’re being honest.) So I pivoted to half and half, stacking an unwrapped cake on top of a wrapped one to make the live ones. That way, for each dozen dozen cupcakes, you get 4 live and 4 dead. You’ll need a little more than 1 recipe of American “buttercream” to make 8 of each from 2 dozen cupcakes. Don’t worry about making your colors match the game exactly if you don’t want to, and don’t feel like you have to mix a billion colors of frosting to make them all totally different. Shapeshifters are a thing, after all.

I don’t normally crumb coat cakes, but these are cupcakes and peeling off the wrappers is kind of a crapshoot. The construction also proved a little problematic in a slidy way, so refrigerating the crumb-coated proto-crewmates turned out to the the way to go. It also made the colored frosting set up faster when I applied it later. I used a vanilla wafer on top to get a rounder shape with less frosting; it’s optional.

If you can’t get your crewmates to hold together, a lollipop stick may help. And if you want to pipe a faceplate or make one out of fondant rather than use a slice of marshmallow, you’re welcome to go for it. I just noticed that marshmallows were exactly the right size, and glued each slice on with a little brushing of water after the frosting set up. Super easy FTW.

For dead bodies, pipe a ring of colored frosting around the edge of each cupcake. Allow to set, then pipe and smooth reddish-tinted chocolate frosting inside the ring to cover the middle. I used quick-and-dirty Ziploc piping, but you’re welcome to use a “real” tip if you prefer.

My initial plan was to make bone-shaped cookies to stick into these, maybe coat them with candy melts to keep the buried ends from disintegrating. I do have a bone mold pan, but it’s too thick to look right at scale. So I tried to make them freeform and…it didn’t…work. Unless you like your cookies really phallic.

Fortunately I had some bright white candy melts in edible condition, and some lollipop sticks to mold them around. Cut the sticks in half with kitchen scissors before starting. Don’t melt the wafers all the way to dipping consistency; if they’re brand-new fresh and you can’t avoid it, let the bowl sit for a while until the candy is no thinner than frosting. Attach a little ball of candy to the end of each stick and shape with your fingers into cartoony bones. Lay them down on waxed paper or parchment to set. You may need to make the bones a little small at first to avoid drooping, and add more layers as the candy cools. Once completely set, insert the blank stick end into the middle of the dead-body cupcakes.

I didn’t address the oxygen tanks. If you want to make them, I suggest trimming down and lightly frosting rectangular marshmallows or sugar wafer cookies, and attaching them with a couple of toothpicks. Anything else is just going to succumb to gravity (artificial or otherwise) and fall off.

Now go do your tasks in electrical.