Back to blogging? Maybe :)

I'm guessing most have given up on me blogging - I honestly had as well :) but scrolling through my blog this weekend, I have been inspired to try again. I know I won't blog often - especially since I'm not actually baking a whole lot these days (15 months in and I'm still figuring out the two kids balancing act :) but think I will still give it a try!



A year and a half later...a world of difference in my life!
(Outerspace cupcakes for a co-worker. Satellites made of laffy taffy!)

 So to catch on life since my last post in August of 2011 - YIKES! We have had another baby- a little girl, who is now not really a baby anymore. She is an all out toddler these days. Cute as a cupcake for sure, but she is definitely giving me a run for my money (think she is TOO much like me :) she does not sit still, she is into everything, she can't talk but knows how to tell you exactly what she wants! Luckily she does have a ridiculously adorable smile and knows how to light up any room. My son who was a toddler last time I wrote is now a pretty well spoken 3 year old! Everyday I am amazed at how grown up he is - and how he knows all these big words all of a sudden. When I picked him up from school on Friday - he goes "Seriously, Mommy?" Ha. That one might be my fault - but surprised me none-the-less. He keeps us laughing - and the two of them together are definitely double trouble! And they are absolutely my excuse as to why I have not been baking or writing or doing much besides keeping them happy and out of trouble, working, and running - BUT I wouldn't have it any other way :)


My All to grown up Three-Year Old! Kellan Wazowski :)



My Princess...at 15 months - definitely not a baby anymore
(wearing her Penguins Cheerleading Outfit as what else is a good Pittsburgh fan to do on a Baltimore-San Fran Super Bowl Day but cheer for our Hockey team :)
 

Speaking of running - while I have trained a lot over the past year since having my little princess, I have not raced much and the races I have run have not been anything to write-ome about. Life has just been busy and despite what I thought has been solid training, I have not been able to sleep much over the past year and honestly other things such as the kids birthday parties and Halloween Parades(which fell on the same day as my fall marathon) have been more important. And I'm okay with that - as while I am confident I will have many more marathons and races, I am pretty sure I only have a few Halloweens when the kids let me get to pick, design, and create their costumes. For the record we did win the local Halloween Costume Contest - so that was pretty cool and definitely made up for a not so great marathon. Now that it is a new year and the kids are a little older though, I do plan to try again to tackle my PRS (all from pre-kids 2008/09 timeframe still) - so we'll see what the year brings, starting with the Myrtle Beach half marathon in a few weeks!

 

Kellan McQueen

Addie Shiftwell

 

 

This Whole Cars Gang (including me as FLO still in my MCM Finisher Jacket!)

Okay and now to the real meat of the blog - a year and a half worth of cupcakes to catch up on- aghh! Although, like I said I have not baked all that much due to the juggling of kids, running, working, and trying to have some fun :) so not as many as could have been...but still a few fun ones. As a warning these are not going to be in any logical order as much of the past year and a half really is a blur :) at least time-wise! Lots of great memories - just not sure of the order!

Since I started by talking about the Cars Halloween costumes I made this year - we'll start with the Cars cakes and cupcakes for Addie's first birthday and Kellan's 3rd birthday celebration. The first of hopefully many joint birthday parties (until they are old enough to want their own :) 

Holley and Lightning Cakes

Cars Cupcakes to complete our Cars Fall!

I did a smash cake Holley for Addie and since I was in mini-cake mode, I also made one for Kellan. I ran out of time on the cupcakes so they are not my favorites - but I used grahm crakers for the wind-shields and if you have ever had grahm cracker and icing - you may know it's a pretty awesome combination - so despite not my best decorating, all of the kids and parents still seemed to enjoy the cupcakes!


Lightning and Mater Costumes Doubling as Decorations welcoming guests!

To combat all the sugar, the practical mother of two I now am gave out tootbrushes as favors
(which were actually a big hit with all the kids and parents, too!)

As you can see from the cars costumes and cars cupcakes for Kellan and Addie's birthday - we continued our Pixar theme from last year. Oh guess I did not write about last years yet - hmmm. Okay quick review. Last fall we did Toy Story for Halloween and Kellan's 2nd Birthday...

Kellan Lightyear and Daddy as Woody! People did stop them and ask for autographs!

The whole Toy Story Gang (Baby Addie is hiding under my Mrs. Potato head costume as she was born about 2 weeks later!)

My mother-in-law actually made all of the costumes but Kellan's Buzz - which I did make. She did a pretty amazing job - clearly :) and we did win the Halloween Parade Costume for the first time after taking second place the two years before. This Halloween thing has become a pretty big deal with us if you can't tell :) And like this year, we carried the Toy Story theme right into Kellan's birthday party - since Buzz light year has been one of his all-time favorites for quite a while now! 

The craft table set-up for Kellan's Toy Story Birthday - complete with real "The Claw" machine

 

Another excuse to make Toy Story Cupcakes!

 

 

The Birthday boy enjoying his last birthday without a little sister to share it with (and yes I do mean share it with as Addie decided it was time to join the party hours after Kellan's real birthday - we had the party early just in case :)

Okay - so now we are caught up on the past two birthdays and Halloweens (sorry lil more than just cupcakes), as you can see Oct-Nov are super busy times at our house. I have always loved fall though - so it's absolutely perfect in my mind that both of the kids birthdays fall at such a fun time of year!

 

Well since my favorite 15 month old just woke up and is now demanding my attention...going to do a quick dump of a few of my other favorites from the year quickly before she tears up every tissue in the house or climbs completely on the desk as she is now trying to do...

 

My favorite easy cupcakes - for teacher appreciation week at the kids school

 The chalk board cupcakes are one of my favorite go-to easy and ALWAYS cute cupcakes. They are really quick to make - as you just need to swirl on icing and then add chocolate covered grahmcrakers with icing letters/numbers on them. The final touch is the runt apples and the good and plety pieces of chalk- and done!


Nationals Cupcakes for a 30th birthday

Thought these were fun as have not really ever done baseball cupcakes. I made bats out of caramel and then used the white chocolate melts as the little balls. Then to make the hats and bigger baseballs I used the pull and peel licorice. The ball cap brims are just melted red/white chocolate. 

And last but not least (for this post at least) these were probably the highlight of my "cupcaking" last year. High-heeled cupcakes for my Aunt's 50th birthday party last spring. I had SO much fun making these FAB @ 50 cupcakes. I kept them pretty simple as I made them in my mom's kitchen in Pittsburgh (so I only had what I brought with me - not my full baking cupboard). I used the pirouette cookie sticks for the heals and then grahmcracker soul of the shoe (again remember the graham/icing combination - yum!) I did a mix of bows and other decoration out of Extra pink gum and the jumbo sized sprinkles. Also used lots of sanding sugar to make the color pop - and to save me from having to dye different colors of icing - making them easier.

 

Well that will have to wrap it up for now - hopefully more to come if I can keep on top of things, but for now Princess Adelyn has had enough of me ignoring her for the computer and keeps stealing my mouse to get my attention. So so long for now. Happy Super Bowl Sunday!

Continue reading...

An All-Around Catch-up Weekend

Soooo...guessing you might have thought I might never blog here again. Honestly, I was starting to think that myself. I have been meaning to get to it and update, but as usual life has been getting in the way. Actually it started because in March we found out we were expecting a new little Flick so for the first three months I didn't want to blog since I wasn't ready to tell the online world that we were pregnant - plus I was nice and tired :) Then somehow the three months turned into six months - and here we are today. I actually have not been baking all that much over the summer. Partly because it's been so hot that I haven't wanted to turn on the oven unless absolutely necessary and partly because we've just been  between work and trying to keep running and going on vacation etc and beyond that I've been using all of my energy just to keep up with my non-stop little man and to get ready for our little girl coming in 3 short months now!

That said - while they have been few and far between, I have actually put together some of my All-Time favorite cupcakes this year, so the goal of this post, like the goal of my weekend has been (cleaning out the basement, raking leave (YES our yard was already covered and YES I know it's only August!) cleaning bathrooms, and organizing closets, posting pics online, etc) is to play catch up and highlight these cupcakes!

Because the past year has been a bit of a blur, I am not going to even try to put these in chronological order (we'll blame that on the baby brain :), so going to start with what I would have to consider quite possibly my best cupcakes ever. These were for the fourth Birthday party of one of my Running Buddie's sons. He asked for Toy Story cupcakes. I was so excited because I have been wanting to do toy story cupcakes for quite a while now - and was right after Toy Story 3 had really come out - so I do have to say I might have gotten a little carried away! The most challenging part for me was figuring out how/what to do for each character. And the number of characters I decided to include was where I probably went overboard, but being such a Toy Story and PIXAR fan it was really hard to decide who to include and who to leave out. Thus the final list ended up being: Buzz, Woody, the Aliens, Ham, Mr. Potato Head, Slinky, the toy soldiers, and Rex! Here is part of the gang. I do have to admit that Rex was kind of a mess-up but and was the result of just playing with extra green icing - but thought he was a nice addition so we kept him :)

 The Aliens were straight from the example at FamilyFun.com using marshmallows with black icing dots as eyes (think Family Fun uses white m&ms, but since they are expensive and I didn't have them on hand I went with the half mini-marshmallows instead) The toy soldiers are obviously my easy filler cupcakes - just ice and stick a soldier in! I decided to just do cowboy hats for Woody as my attempt at making his full face just didn't look right and the hats (made out of shaped caramels) ended up being cuter and obviously way simpler. Ham was super easy and fun  - just used a half a marshmallow for his nose and starburst slightly melted and shaped for his ears. Then "spray painted" him with pink spray on icing color and added his eyes and eye brows. Then Mr. Potato head was a caramel flattened and shaped with starburst ears and icing hat and mouth and feet. I have to admit I was pretty excited how he turned out :)Slinky Dog was following a pretty basic dog pattern using a nilla wafer for his mouth/nose, mini-marshmallows for his eyes,caramel for his ears, and icing for the rest of his face.

The biggest challenge was figuring out Buzz's helmet. Online I saw a picture of exactly how I wanted to do Buzz, using half of clear Christmas ornaments as the helmet. Only problem is I no longer work near a Michael's and could not seem to find time to get out to one. Luckily my baking partner in crime Christy has a Micheal's both enroute to work as well as near her house - so she commenced a search. Unfortunately her first Michael's did not have them :( So both her office and mine spent a good afternoon discussing other options for the helmets. It was actually kind of funny to see our co-workers - yes even the guys - get into thinking of ideas. We thought of the tops of Starbucks drink cups, oops - they have lids, the little plastic containers in the quarter machines at the grocery store - close but to small, and the ideas went on and on, but none were quite right. Luckily Christy's back-up Michael's had the clear ornaments on hand and she was able to grab them for me! YAY! She saved the day again!

Buzz was by far the trickiest one to do - but also the most fun. I used cookies for his face then iced them with skin color and outlined with his signature purple and decorated with icing. The ornament globes definitely made him pop though - and pretty sure he was the star of the party! To Infinity and Beyond!!!!

Hoppping along to Easter...I did super simple cupcakes. Just butter pecan flavor with pink cream cheese icing topped with the CUTEST cupcake toppers I've seen - that my mom sent to us. Made decorating a cinch! Which was good, because I also decided to try my hand at Cake pops - which were not so easy (for me at least!) They turned out delicious - but wow - definitely a challenge for the first time. My friend Megan is semi-pro at these, so I keep telling her I need to just stand there and watch next time she makes them - there has to be some trick or something. I just found mine to be mis-shaped and messy. Luckily I was only making Easter Eggs - so the abstract look worked :) If you have never made cake balls before you create a mixture of cake and icing then shape into balls and freeze onto sticks. Then once set, you dip into melted chocolate and serve or add icing/decorations. You can see some of my eggs didn't do so well on the sticks, but luckily they still looked nice on the4 edge of the cupcake plate. And like I said - they were pretty delicious - so definitely worth the extra effort. Will just need to keep practicing them to get the method down!

Hmmm...what next. Oh here's another super easy set of cupcakes I did this Spring - for my nieces first birthday party. My sister-in-law request Minnie Mouse cupcakes - only catch was that we would all be at a family wedding the day before so would have to do all decorating the morning of the party. Clearly needed something quick and easy - but they had to be cute enough to be perfect for the little Birthday Princess! I did a bunch of googling on Minnie Mouse cupcakes and saw several pretty easy kind of abstract looking ones so thought they looked like the best bet - and actually I LOVED how they turned out - especially since they were so easy! Just did pink icing with chocolate candy melt ears, white pearl sprinkles for the polka dots and then topped with a red icing bow. Minnie all ready to go for the party!

Okay - think I have time for one more before the little man wakes up from his nap. So here's another one of my favorites from the summer. Flower cupcakes for another Baby Shower! :) Hurray for 2011 babies! The shower was a garden themed tea party, so I had fun making a mix of flowers. I did a few sunflowers - using mini-oreos for the center, then did daisies with mini marshmallow petals and candy centers. These ones are kind of cool as you cut the mini-marshmallows in half and then dip the sticky side in colored sugar and they appear to be an instant flower petal. Really they are not hard - just perhaps a bit tedious, but definitely worth it. I then added a few icing daisies to create a bit of variety like a real garden. Finally, I also found the cutest little flower lollipops on sale at Michael's so I had liked idea of "planting" them in little flower pots of cupcakes covered with oreo dirt. I wasn't quite sure how they would mix-in with the other flowers, but think they went alright and if nothing else were something different for sure! Here they are all packed up and ready for their tea party debut!

 

From what I heard both sets of cupcakes went over quite well. And most importantly - they have a new little girl in the family now - YAY! :) 

Alright - well guess I have baked a bit more then I realized over the past few months so will have to finish catching up next time- since I need to get back to catching up around the house now. Keep an eye out for an update on a Dr. Seuss cupcake set and shower and a rockin Guitar Cupcake cake next time (promise it won't be quite as long!!!) For now, Happy SUMMER! :)

Continue reading...

It's Raining on Sunday...

It's raining outside and quiet inside (the boys are still sleeping so it's just me and 91.9 on the radio :) and actually really quite nice. And since I ran my long run for the week yesterday (which my legs are definitely feeling this morning) I feel no real need to run today so the rain is actually relaxing - again nice. So I am just sitting here writing cards and drinking coffee and now blogging again- on a roll this week.

I have been excited to finally get to these cupcakes on the blog as they are by far the most fun ones I have made yet this year! And even better they were for a super fun occasion - the first birthday of one of K's best buddies Will, whose mom, Emmy, is one of my best friends from college. It was such a blessing to be pregnant at the same time as Em -so nice to have someone close to go through all the ups and downs of the "long" 9 months with. Plus, now we have been able to share the joys of the first year of having little boys together - just awesome!

In anycase, that said, I wanted to make Will's cupcakes perfect, but being that 1. they live in Philly now (just bought a super cute house in Havertown!!) so whatever I made had to be able to survive the 2.5 hour trip up 95 and 2. I have never done Winnie the Pooh cupcakes before this was going to be a challenge. I looked and looked for good inspiration for Pooh cupcakes online, but just did not find anything I really liked. I did come accross a few smash cake ideas I liked, but just no fun cupcakes. What to do, what to do??? So I kept looking and looking up to the week of the party. I knew the color scheme I wanted so I made sure I had all the icing and cupcake liners I needed, but still was not sure what I was going to do for the Pooh Bear design. Then while changing K one night that week, his Huggie wipes container caught my attention - it was Winnie the Pooh. And a nice and simple but very cute Winnie the Pooh at that. Poor K ended up laying there diaper-less for a few minutes as I distractedly picked up the wipe box and stared at it trying to think about would this pooh work. Hmmm...PERFECT.

So using the newly discovered Pooh wipe box as my inspiration I set out to make Pooh bears and Pots of honey to go along with bee-hives. As I still find red one of the hardest colors to make look sharp in icing - (for some reason it always looks pinkish) I decided to do my sanding sugar trick to really make the red pop. Plus as I've said before I really LOVE the combination of icing with the sugar on top - so again a win-win. Then to mix-it up a bit more so I would have some yellow based cupcakes, also coated in sanding sugar, I made cupcakes with red 1's on them. (these also were a bit easier - so gave my hand a little break :)

Pooh Party coming to life on my counter, comp;ete with sanding sugar still out..

Cupcakes all packed up and ready for teh trek up 95.

Once the cupcakes were done, I had to make the smash cake. As I mentioned, I had found some good ideas for the cake, BUT the bigger issue here was making sure it would make the trip to Philly. The pictures I found online actually used the Wilton little bear cake pan which I already had (what I used for Cookie Monster cake for K's bday) so that was a plus. My concern was that if I make a 3-D cake will it really make it in the car and if it doesn't  - then what?? Then Will has no fun cake for his First Birthday? Not acceptable. So just in case, I made 2 cakes for Will - using the extra batter after filling the Wilton pan, I just made an 8 inch round cake figuring I could make some sort of Pooh cake out of it for the back-up cake.

As it turns out, both cakes actually turned out pretty well. And despite freezing the little 3-D bear cake overnight to give it the best chance of staying solid in the car, I was super nervous the whole ride up, but the little guy made it in one piece! YAY! So Will lucked out with two Birthday cakes :)

Here is the 3-D Pooh cake on display at the Party!

For the backup cake, I decided to cut the round cake into a pooh head shape - somewhat abstract but think that's one of the best parts about baking - abstract is good! I then used the extra yellow icing I had to coat him in frosting and decorated him like Pooh. Think he actually ended up coordinating pretty well with the pooh faces on the cupcakes and was a nice addition to the cupcake display for the party!

Back-up Pooh cake on display!

Cupcake display. Emmy had the perfect mini-cupcake stand - so cute!

And here is the Birthday Boy facing off with the Pooh cake!

Goofing off in Will's new bedroom. K's not sure about having someone sit on his lap!

And being the big 14mo old here, K felt the need to show Will how to work the new Elmo airplane he gave him for his birthday (K definitely had some practice time before we wrapped it :)

Will's first birthday party was quite the hit! Lots of little guys to play with for K and lots of fun drinks for all the Mommy's and Daddy's and of course yummy food and cupcakes :) :) Just can't believe they are both one now - what a year. Looking forward to many more adventures with these two!

Continue reading...

Blog Break!

So instead of cleaning the house or baking cupcakes (which I need to do at some point before tomorrow for an impromtu baby shower/going away party for a girl at work) or doing anything productive as I should be doing right now since I am home with a sick K, I am sitting here drinking coffee and catching up on reading some of my friends blogs - which I rarely get to do- so kind of a nice break (almost feeling guilty how much I am enjoying K and my impromtu day home!) While I am sitting here though, figured I should take advantage of the opportunity to also update my blog (I know, 2x in 1 week - craziness :)

Before I sound like too bad of a mom though :) Let me clarify that K is sick as in has a 100.5 fever but otherwise besides being super clingy and tired he seems pretty okay. He took some baby advil this morning and is now playing away happily and just keeps coming back to me to take snuggle breaks about every 15 minutes (which I think might be the only real upside of having a sick kid home). Okay now that we have that clarified...back to cupcaking!

Well first actually - here are a few pics of my favorite little icing taste tester from last month :) As you can tell he takes his job VERY seriously :) and makes sure to get every last lick of icing off of the spatula! And while he can't quite tell me yet if the icing is good or not, I'm taking his standing under the mixer holding his spatula up as equal to a thumbs up :)

He even danced with the spatula - def saving this for blackmail when he's 16 :)

 Hmmm still thinking  :) Trying to decide whether or not to give his approval.

The cupcakes that Kellan helped ensure the icing was on par was for a fun set of Birthday/Running cupcakes for my running buddy and coach :) Kathy! As you can tell by the cupcakes Kathy is running Boston (again!) this Spring!

Simply put, Kathy is AWESOME and she has somehow tricked me into training with her and a few other girls who are also running Boston this Spring. I say tricked as while I love running I have NEVER been one to stick to a training plan, but by not really laying it out as a training plan and rather just telling me where to be when for morning runs and then telling me the workout upon arrival, Kathy has me training with them! So not only do I not have to dread :) the track or tempo workouts as I only have about a minute to think about them before we start, but the group of girls who are training with Kathy are super fun so it's become somewhat of a social hour with solid workouts so I actually look forward to them!

The cupcakes are simple vanilla with vanilla frosting covered in pink, purple and silver sanding sugar, which makes them look pretty different with the flash off vs on with my camera (above are without flash). The things with the nike swoosh's are supposed to be running shoes, but were kind of tough to make out of icing :)

Hopefully the cupcakes will be lucky ones and Kathy and all of my running buddies running Boston will do AWESOME! Not that they need luck - as they have all been training super hard and should do amazing anyway, so guess I will have to work on ideas for Boston Celebration Cupcakes for the end of April!

Continue reading...

Final Flashback of 2010 - Finally!

So finally finally finally...here is my grand finale of cupcakes from 2010 so I can finally get to my already growing list of 2011 ones :) Yeah, yeah, yeah so I am way far-behind. I know. Maybe someday I will catch up - or maybe not :)  For now, I've just accepted that all I can do is the best I can do :) I will say I was excited today at work when someone said something about how I must be super organized to be able to fit in running along with work and Kellan, etc. HAHA...not so much - if she could only see my kitchen - or worse my baking cupboard!!! :)

In any case, here are the last of my favorites from the fall - starting off with the Sesame Street Parade for Kellan's first birthday in November! I was pleasantly surprised with how these came out! I had even done a practice round (that my office greatly enjoyed!) to make sure I could pull them off for the big day. Turns out they were actually fairly easy - especially using the oreo's for mouths and marshmallows for whites of eyes like I did instead of fondant :) Then did dots of black icing to finish off the eyes and used peanut m&ms for Bert, Ernie and Elmo's noses and shaped starbursts for Big Bird's beak and wahlah...we had a complete Sesame Street Party!

Then for the little man's smash cake - I made a 3d Cookie Monster! Again - I was actually pleasantly surprised how this turned out - especially since the cake pan used was the Wilton 3D teddy bear pan that I had used for my niece's first birthday a few years ago. Who knew it would come in so handy?!?

Going back a bit more in time to October - here is a quick set of baby girl cupcakes I made for a co-worker. As her daughter made her arrival a good 6 weeks early - we never really had a chance to give her a good send off before her birth, so made these to welcome her back to the office! I was super excited about using the pink with brown polka dot cupcake papers - so coordinated the icing with a chocolate icing with pink accents. Enjoyed making these - kinda like abstract art :)

Then going back to earlier in October - here are the Super Cupcakes I made for one of my running buddies Super son :) The birthday party was a fabulous fall/halloween festival with a Super Hero Theme! So fun! I really had fun making these ones and since I had done batman earlier this year for her other son's bday (think super heros are big at the Haddon house these days!?! :)

Think the trick to really making these cupcakes look sharp was dipping the cupcakes the yellow or blue sugar and then decorating the batman or superman logo on top. Just seemed to make the colors stand out more (plus think icing completely covered with sanding sugar is my fav way to top a cupcake-YUM!)

Squeezed in between the marathon of Birthday parties I did this fall, my baking buddy Christy and I did our first wedding! It was quite the adventure - but we ended up having a blast and at the end of the day the Bride was happy so we were all happy :) We decided to divide and conquer the challenge of baking 200 cupcakes plus a grooms "cake" and a mini-wedding cake. Luckily Christy knows that although not all that different then cupcakes, I am TERRIBLE at cakes :) go figure. In any case, she let me take on the Grooms Cupcakes while she put together the mini-wedding cake. The groom had requested  fishing themed cupcakes with the only other prerequesite being that he wanted JUMBO cupcakes.

The water fall with the fishing guy in the middle is what resulted :) Actually turned out fairly easy - the true challenge was getting it to Tysons corner for the reception in one piece - talk about a stressful drive! Luckily he made it and with only minor repairs he was ready to go for the party!

Christy and I with the complete ensemble. I know it's small - but hopefully you can see her super cute mini-wedding cake. SO IMPRESSIVE - especially since like me Christy is really a cupcaker at heart!

Here are the wedding cupcakes out and ready for the main event! At the bride's request we did three cake/icing combinations: champagne cake with champagne icing, yellow cake with chocolate icing and chocolate cake with white icing. Thinking of her guests, the bride wanted to make sure there was a flavor for everyone and really think the combination actually turned out well!  We also lucked out that the hotel hosting the reception had such great cupcake/dessert stands - really made it look pretty cool and helped us help the bride and groom kick start a Happy Forever!

Okay - last but not least, here is a safari animal parade for the first birthday party of another one of my running buddies sons. Despite making animals several times before, I find them a challenge everytime. There is always one animal I seem to get stuck on! This time it was definitely the lions. They ended up turning out okay - but took some serious icing surgery as at first they definitely looked more like puppies then lions!

Close up of lion (after surgery - you can still see the remnants of a puppy face - someday I will get it down!) My favorite animals from the safari parade ended up being the elephants and the zebras - and not only because they ended up being the easiest to make. They were both new animals for me this time - but both turned out super cute - so that was exciting! I wasn't quite sure what color to make the elephants, but the elephant on the cupcake paper that I was using as my example was the teal color so I thought I would give it a try - and really like how it actually brightens up the whole ensemble! The zebras I saw somewhere online - can't remember now - but they looked fairly easy and cute - so had to give them a try! The monkeys and tigers I've done a few times now - although somehow they always look different - kind of funny. 

Okay - think that wraps up the highlights from 2010. Yes, in case you are wondering, I did make plenty of Christmas cupcakes - but being that it's almost time to start thinking about Easter think I will hold those off for next winter! For now bring on 2011 - only 2 months late :)



Continue reading...