Ca-Cake Ca-Cake!

Cupcakes to celebrate a Sweet Baby Girl to-be!

One of Addie's first 20 words is Ca-Cake! I'm terrible at writing things down, so I have to admit I am not sure what her first official word was, but I am excited to report that her limited vocabulary at this time includes Cupcake :) or something like it! A few of the other words on her top-ten list include "Tick-Tock (this actually may have been her first word thanks to watching Jake and the Neverland Pirates on repeat with K), bubble, Mommy, Daddy, Ka-ka (for Kellan), booka (not sure where the accented A on book came from :), row (this is her first song as well - she sings row, row, row, then looks to you to sing the rest and then claps when you finish- very cute-thank you daycare!), and there are a few more that are escaping me now. In any case, despite my winter-hibernation from baking, she is still quite familiar with cupcakes - in fact for PJ day recently she made a point to pick out her ca-cake pjs. I have to say her enthusiasm for them has actually inspired me to get back to a bit more baking!

My silly girl in her cupcake pjs!

Speaking of which - I baked cupcakes for work for the first time in a long time! We had a baby shower for one of the guys in my office who's wife is expecting a little girl next month. A few of the girls on his team pulled together an adorable shower, complete with electric tea lights in baby food jars and flowers in bottles - SO CUTE! Definitely one of the best parties at work in a long time.

Originally, I had planned on making the baby rattle cupcakes I have made before, and while I love them and they are usually a hit, since I have had limited time to bake lately, when I do, I have found myself wanting to try new things. Thus, I did some serious googling and pinteresting on baby girl cupcakes and decided I wanted to try the baby face ones as I found lots of cute ones. However, I wanted to make sure they were clearly girl faces, and lucked out when I came across a website with  baby faces with little pink bows - and pink sugar cheeks - simple but cute! Since I still do not like the taste of fondant (nor know how to make it :) I went with my current go-to cupcake decorating candy of choice - Laffy Taffy, which has also become my husbands favorite candy to throw in his lunch box for work so we have been keeping it on hand! Shaping the binkys was definitely the most time-consuming part of these cupcakes, but well worth it in the end. The bows I also did from Laffy Taffy, but they were pretty easy.

Once I had all the bows and binkys made I pretty much had a baby making assembly line going and they came together pretty quickly. The cheeks were a little tricky to get nice and round, but I found that a touch of water on my finger allowed me to pick up the perfect amount of the sugar to transfer to the cupcakes. This actually was a little tricky and took me a few tries as if you have too much water the sugar would get wet and not stay on the cupcake. I found that wetting a paper towel and then pressing my finger onto the paper towel and then into the sugar was the best technique. The eyes and mouths are simply piped on with a little black icing - and waa-laa we have a little baby girl!

Close-up of Cupcake Baby Girls!

The rest of the cupcakes I simply swirled on pink icing and used a few baby cupcake picks I had - this was mainly to save time since mid-week baking is always tough at our house, but  actually like how the mix of pink and baby face cupcakes turned out!

Finally, while I was doing all my "research" on these cupcakes I came around some really fun "bib and onesie cupcake presents," and was inspired to try these as well. They were actually really easy- I just rolled the bibs and onesies intno the shapes of cupcakes, secured them with Addie's medium sized pony tail holders, topped with bows as my cupcake toppers :) and placed them in  cupcake papers in a six-pack cupcake container. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised and pretty excited with how they turned out. When I showed the kids they both wanted to eat them :) and Addie started yelling "ca-cake, ca-cake" so I am taking that as an indication that they were a success!

First attempt at Bib-and Onesie cupcakes - this may be my new go-to baby shower present :)