Rockin' Monkeys!

April Showers bring May flowers, AND May and June babies in my world right now! While we actually didn't have all that many rain showers, April was definitely a heavy baby shower month for me, and I couldn't have been more excited for such a great excuse to do lots of baking! After several pretty in pink little girl-to-be celebrations, I was pumped to make some blue Rock Star Monkeys for my friends Christy and Adam's shower. This little guy is their first- and they are over the moon excited - as is the whole SR running club since Adam is our club president (Hope this little guy is a runner!) Pretty sure Adam is actually the first person I met when we moved to SR five years ago, since I would drive to SR from the hotel we lived in for two months to run with the club in the morning. He helped me learn the lay of the land and would even let me modify our routes to loop down my new street so I could run by our house before we closed on it :) Needless to say, I've been looking forward to making these cupcakes for them for a while now!

 

As soon as I saw the invitation for the shower which I later found out was based on Christy's nursery theme (see picture - so cute!) I knew we needed monkeys and guitar cupcakes. I have done several monkeys now, but as has been the case lately, I wanted to try something new and also needed something easy since she needed four dozen for a Saturday party and I also wanted to run our local SR High School 5K that morning so I had to bake them during the week. In past monkey cupcake google searches I have seen the monkeys with the Nilla wafer faces, but have never tried them as I wasn't quite sure how they turned out. In a quick refresher search to see if there were any new monkey ideas out there, I saw Nilla wafer monkeys with piped, fur like icing versus the knife spread flat icing look and not only did I like the look much better, but I knew it would be even easier and faster - since spreading with a knife usually takes me double the time. Thus decided to give them a try. For the guitars, I had to rack my brain a bit since laffy taffy does not come in blue :) but during a quick run through Target I found Airheads which come in a nice bright blue and are just as moldable - score!

 

Once I had everything I needed - which really was not much for the Monkeys - just Nilla wafers and candy eyes, the Monkey assembly was pretty easy. Breaking the Nilla wafers into the right size/shape for the ears was harder than I had thought, as I they kept breaking into smaller pieces - luckily I had a big box and two kids who didn't mind helping me get rid of the broken ones (especially dipped in a little icing :)  I had fun mixing up the faces, but kept them all super simple with two nose dots and curly lines and circles for mouths.

Making the guitars was probably the toughest part of the set, and even that was more tedious then hard. The one thing I did struggle with is that the guitars were very flexible - they seemed to bend backwards so had to add extra icing to hold up the long end. I have never had anyone really complain about too much icing, so don't think this was really too much of a problem :) I then added black lines of icing for the strings to complete the look.

 

Finally, since I needed 4 dozen cupcakes and wanted to add some color/variety to them(and was tired of making monkeys and guitars :) I made half of the icing blue and topped with upside down white chocolate melts and piped on little musical notes. Okay, really these were my "filler" cupcakes, but I was actually really happy with how they turned out and I liked how they added to the set. Win-win!

 

And last but not least, since I am still on my bib and onsie cupcake kick and had not yet done one for a little boy, I did a Cars/Mickey themed set for this little guy. I wasn't quite sure what to do to "top" these cupcakes since I have been using bows and flowers for the little girl ones, but I settled on a mix of binkys (including several glow-in-the-dark ones as must add since I think they are awesome and wish I had known about them before my second baby was 15 months - they are game changing when you are looking for that lost binky in the middle of the night!!!!). I thought they ended up useful and fun, which is what I was going for since Christy has given me some of the cutest most practical presents ever (think babywash wrapped in super soft blankets with baby pins type presents) for my babies - so was happy to have my turn to shower her!! :)