Cupcake Camp

One of my friends from work wanted to learn how to decorate fancy cupcakes. I am certainly not well versed in this area, but am learning. We decided to learn together. I picked out a couple of cupcake designs from Hello, Cupcake! I tried to find some that were cute, but easy enough for us to get started with and have a successfull experience.

So the first one was a sunflower cupcake, complete with a ladybug. I started getting things ready a couple of days ahead. I made the frosting and colored it in all the appropriate colors. I figured out how to make the leaves. See the fruit gels next to the plate? Well you take the green ones and smash them with a rolling pin. You add sugar to keep them from sticking. Then you use a leaf cookie cutter to cut out the leaf shapes.

Here are some more of our raw materials. We used regular and mini oreos. Red M&M's became our ladybugs.

The book has you pipe the black areas of the lady bugs. We tried it on a couple and it was quite fussy and tedious. Seriously, on an M&M?  Much easier to use an edible black marker.

Cupcakes ready to go.2 sizes. The smaller ones are for the second project.

Here is Katherine, getting ready to start making the petals. You can see the cupcakes are already frosted in green, the leaves and oreos are in place. The directions said to add the leaves after you put the petals on. We didn't think that would work as well, so we added them first.

Closeup.

Petal making.

Finished project! We were quite pleased with the results. And I learned several new techniques in the process.

The spread. I didn't eat a single one. We delivered some to work and I also delivered some to the folks I visit for church.

The second batch were mini cup cakes. We were supposed to heat the icing for 4-5 seconds in the microwave. Supposedly then you can dip the cupcake and it would be somewhat liquid and develop a smooth, shiny surface. Didn't happen that way. We ended up frosting them pretty traditionally. Then we were piping white decorations on them so they were supposed to look similiar to petit fours.

Not really but it was fun anyway. These went to the office too.

We had a great time and think we'll have to do it again!