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