Because on your birthday...

you get to decorate your cake however you want. This birthday girl wanted to practice the technique of filling in shapes with the star tip, so she made a kitty stick figure on her cake.
And she wrote "yay" in the corner, just for kicks.

Partway through the evening, someone very carefully cut out kitty's head and served it to me. I wasn't hungry, so I didn't eat it, and by the end of the night, kitty's head was reattached to his body, only upside down.

Party pictures coming soon.

Sunflowers

I made these for a small gathering at my friend Erin's house. They were really fun to make. The sunflowers were oreos with frosting petals and Fruit Roll-up leaves, and the ladybugs were M&Ms. I loved using my frosting tips and will definitely be using them more often.


Some cupcakes had two sunflowers or more:
And some had ladybugs, while others were not as lucky.

My favorite show is returning

Looks like we get both IMG and Himex this year:

Everest: Beyond the Limit

March Lions and Lambs

After several tries at copying the recipes out of my cupcake book, creativity has finally struck. I'd come across a neat blogger (http://bakerella.blogspot.com/) who had been creating something called "cake pops." Basically, cake pops are cake balls on sticks. Okay, what's a cake ball? Well, besides the source of many a sophomoric joke, cake balls are crumbled up cake mixed with frosting and dipped in candy melts. Bakerella decorates hers in all sorts of neat ways, so I decided to combine my enthusiasm for cupcake decorating with cake pops.

I made lions and lambs in honor of our lion-like entrance into March:

The best part about these is that the decorations are almost entirely of my own invention. I stole the lion's mane (which is my least favorite part, frankly) from the cupcake book, but everything else was my own. The lion's ears are created with chocolate chips stuck to the cake pop with frosting before dipping, and the pink insides are little hearts. The lamb's ears are Swedish fish stuck into the ball before dipping, with curled Twizzlers Pull-n-Peel for the inside of the ears. Noses are an M&M and half a Jelly Belly, respectively.

The rest of their faces are drawn on with my new toys: edible pens. I was stupidly excited about the idea of edible pen, but it practice, it didn't go so well. The candy started sweating fairly quickly and then the pens hardly worked. Next time I'll probably keep everything in the fridge while decorating.

They turned out pretty cute, and they were tasty, too. Hopefully none of my creations ever turn up on my other new favorite blog: http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/