And Now For Some Cupcakes!

Well, I made my first cupcakes from my new book: Hello, Cupcake! We really loved them and thought they turned out great!

I took a risk and let The Princess choose whatever she wanted out of the book for her birthday. I thought she took it pretty easy on me when she chose this one:

And she really did, these are probably the least complicated in the entire book~thank goodness. Although putting it together was the challenge! Vince and I nearly came to blows in the kitchen trying to get it just right-ha!!

First I gathered my *stuff*: cupcake papers, cake mix, candy decorations, cookies, frosting ingredients. Then we got started.

I went with the *Funfetti* cake mix, which is just white cake with sprinkles mixed in. As you can see in the photo from the book they used different brightly-colored cupcake papers for each tier with white cake. I couldn't find solid bright cupcake papers anywhere so I decided to use white paper cups and food coloring gels to dye the cake mix. It was a pretty good solution!
After the cupcakes were cooled and frosted (with my fave buttercream frosting!), we began the decorating and stacking process.

Note: use a wider platter than the one in the above picture! We ended up having to take this apart and start over on a very large silver platter.
I never knew that candy could be so expensive!! I bought this at one of those mall candy shops where they sell it by the pound. Quite pricey, but I justified it since I was saving so much money with a *homemade* cake:) wink, wink

Then we put on the cookie candles. I couldn't find these types of cookies with pink stripes like in the book, so we bought these golden Oreo fun stix (which are sinfully delicious, I might add) and my sweet sis, Kari, striped them for me with red food coloring. She did an awesome job!

To make these look like candles you put a *banana* Runt candy in the top and pipe orange frosting around it. Really cute!!
So there you have it! Not perfect by a long shot (especially since I had to trim off some overly browned edges and that made the frosting process more difficult), but a very cute and memorable birthday cake! It tasted absolutely delicious, by the way:)