Archive for Cupcakes

In the next few days I’ll be adding several post of desserts I have made in the past. Lets say, way back in the past.

2012 was a year of lots of sweets and treats that unfortunately did not get posted. So I am planning of showing the pictures and later adding the very important details about each and every event.

So with that, and an apology to my client for posting this so late we’ll get started.

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This was an exciting birthday project.

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Thank you for being patient and enjoying the pictures. I still have a lot more to show you.

In the next few days I’ll be adding several post of desserts I have made… in the past. Lets say, ways back in the past.

2012 was a year of lots of sweets and treats that unfortunately didn’t get posted. So I am planning of showing the pictures and later adding the very important details about each and every event.

So with that, and and apology to my own son, we’ll get started with this post.

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This was all for my Noah’s 4th birthday party.

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Happy Birthday my sweet boy! He is my little Noahsaurus.

Once again I had the pleasure of making birthday treats for a very special friend whom I love so much. Her name is Dessie and she has a couple of beautiful kids, Leo and Gabbie.

Today’s treats were designed for Leo’s 4th birthday. Leo loves animals and he decided to celebrate his birthday at the Des Moines Zoo. Suggested by his mom, a jungle/zoo animal theme was the perfect design.

First things first, finding cute and age appropriate jungle animal clipart. Here’s my inspiration and design base. Just google “jungle animal clipart” if you are ever looking for ideas.

Bakers Tip: Working with large and simple clipart to create cookie or cake decorations is easier than small and busy pictures. The details will drive you crazy when the pictures are small and very detailed.

Here are Leo’s Jungle Animal cupcakes! Cupcake flavors included Chocolate butter and Lemon with a Raspberry filling all of them topped with Buttercream icing.

Dessie’s husband, our dear friend Jon, loves my cookies so sugar cookies were part of my plan.

Now that I’m editing this post, I’m wondering why I didn’t make giraffe print cookies. Oh well….

I arranged a pretty birthday platter for Leo to make Leo’s birthday extra special. Sorry for the ugly pictures.

And the rest of the cookies were bagged in clear treat bags for gift giving. I think by far my favorite animal cookie this time was the tiger below.

The birthday party at the zoo was a lot of fun. They brought out three animals out so children would learn about them. The visitors were a domesticated bunny (aahhhh), a small alligator (scaaary), and the third one I can’t remember, but my boy tells me that it was a turtle so we’ll go with that. The kids and some of the grown ups got to touch them… NOT me. That alligator jumped out of the box when they were taking him out. Thankfully they caught him!!

Happy Birthday sweet Leo.  We loved making the treats for you and I hope you also loved them too. Love Ya!

I had the pleasure of helping a friend with her daughter’s 2nd birthday treats. She wanted some Dora the Explorer decorations and what could be simple, cute and screams Dora? STARS!!

Every cartoon episode of Dora the Explorer will have these stars… they are everywhere! So we decided to turn them into cupcakes toppers.

I also have a surprise for you!!!

I decided to turn this into my very first tutorial for you. So now you can learn how to make Dora the Explorer cupcake toppers also. Enjoy!

1. I rolled some Fondant on a non stick mat. I got my non stick mats from Costco, but you can find them anywhere.  Using a star cookie cutter of any size, cut as many stars as you need.
2. A long time ago, I purchased a sheet of candy or icing  ’eyes’. I will not do that again because they are very easy to make. I will post how to make them later.  Icing eyes are very helpful in decorating cookies, cupcakes and cakes. You can find any type of candy eyes here.   
3. Paste the candy eyes on the star. Place the eyes just above the middle of the star.  You can use Royal Icing or Chocolate. I don’t really know if a tiny bit of water would work, but I would give it a try.
4. Using a food marker you can draw the mouth, eyelashes, eyebrows. I actually used a little bit of melted chocolate to make the mouth, but a red food marker will work perfectly.

Well there you go!  I hope you enjoyed this post and that it was simple and clear. I’m very excited that I finally got to publish my very first tutorial. I know you may have questions like what is Royal Icing or what fondant is. I will try my best to have this in my site as soon as I can.

I have more of everything coming up…. All I need is time!

Dessie is one of my super duper best friends and her lovely daughter Gabbie (Lillie’s super duper best friend) celebrated her 6th birthday at the Des Moines’ zoo last weekend.

Part of the party package includes having the children learn and interact with two animals from the zoo, of course some of the friendly critters. They actually bring them to the room for the kids to see and touch. Gabbie choose to have a turtle and a hedgehog at her party and I decided to add another cute critter to the pack.

When Dessie asked me to take care of her treats this year, I absolutely agreed.

The hedgehog cupcakes are chocolate with buttercream icing.

Then we have some turtles on strawberry cupcakes (Gabbie’s favorite flavor). sitting on a combination of soft yellow and white buttercream icing.

And my addition to the critter set, a sweet fox. Maybe I should have made a red panda since they have one at the zoo. She looks cute (I think).

We also made sugar and brown sugar cookies for party edible favors.

After making these cookies I thought that maybe the fox should have been smelling some pretty flowers instead of a tree with barely any leaves left on the branches. Opps…

The hedgehog walking on grass…

And the turtle swimming in water, sort of… yes, no?

I think I made over 60 chocolate decorations and used them on both the cupcakes and the cookies as you could see.

Gabbie was very happy with her treats and I was delighted to hear to see her pretty happy birthday face.

We love you sweetheart… Happy Birthday!

We again had the opportunity to make treats for one of my favorite family events, Kindermusik’s Fall Family Music Night. It was only appropriate to make spooky treats since the event was held on Saturday 29th, just before Halloween.

Here are some of the cookies we prepared for them this year.

I’m not a huge fan of candy corn (although I can eat a few of them without complaining), but I love how they turned out in cookies.

I love this cookie because it is so versatile and I can make for pretty much every occasion.

The next one was also one of my favorites. I don’t have the spider web cutter, but the circle cutter worked. I wish I would have made it in different colors. The spiders (on the webs) look more like mmh… ticks (yikes!). I’ll fix that next time.

My mom loved this particular cookie design. Eye catching uh? It made a few people wondered how we made that.

I love these friendly creatures. Adorable and cute ghosts.

What’s Halloween without some witches? Here we have the boots/leggings and the hats. Maybe I’ll work on the entire body next year.

And just to make it spooky enough for the little ones…

I was never happy with the “B”… I just couldn’t get it right.

The family night was a lot of fun. It was all about sharing a music night with the whole family and learning while doing it.  Let me share the experience with you if you have never been to one of them.

Parents and children gather in a spacious room with the very awesome and talented Jenn Horak leading everyone on a musical journey of fun and games. Jenn either plays music or sings to everyone to make kids become active while they jump, sing, dance and share musical instruments.  They may not know it, but children are learning and developing other skills (social, musical, and more).

Caregivers become active too! Grown ups get to participate along with the kids on this musical event as they also get to sing and dance with their little ones.

If you are interested or just curious about Kindermusik, visit their website. My children have benefited tremendously from this learning experience and I’m sure yours will too. My son Noah is almost 3 years old and he absolutely looks forward to Saturdays for his music classes.

We got very positive feedback from the cookies we made this year. I just feel bad that I ran out of them  in the end!

Check out last year’s event here.

Enjoy a sweet treat every day!

I finally got a chance to post this. This post really did take me a lot of time to get it done. Here it is…

The love of my life (one of them) turned 5 years old on July 4th (sniff). It breaks my heart to see her grow up, but she is turning out to be this wonderful little lady (with a sassy attitude) and I couldn’t be more proud of her.

For some reason, something almost always goes wrong whenever I make cakes for my family and I tend to be very unhappy with the end results. However, this year I was happy with Lillie and Noah’s cake.

Lillie decided to have a Scooby Doo party for her 1st birthday party (yes, she had a few). So Scooby Doo it is!. They have both become very big fans of the lovable Great Dane.

I was soooo busy with all the party details that these are the only pictures I managed to get of her cake (… bad ones).

The cake design is meant to be Scooby Doo’s collar with his doggy tag. Velma, Shaggy and Scooby himself were part of the topper. We had chocolate butter cake as the main cake, vanilla bean buttercream for the filling and it was covered in fondant.

I made a lot of sugar cookies and added the chocolate images, doggy bones and some funky colorful flowers. I couldn’t get better pictures being in such a rush.

 … and some chocolate and fondant details of the cake.

Here are only few of the pictures of Lillie’s friends having fun breaking the pinata and waiting for cake. Friends, you might see some of you out there too.

Overall we had a pretty good, but windy day. We had to leave sooner than we wanted because rain and lightning were fast approaching.

Thank you very much to all our wonderful friends for making the day extra special for our children. Out of the three parties she had, she really enjoyed this day the most. If you weren’t there, we missed you!

Thank You again from my little bakers.

Oh, just to answer someone’s question… we celebrated Noah’s birthday too because I never organized his party back in December. I know, shame on me.

The next cake celebrates Erin’s (her name is on the cake anyway) 40th birthday.

Since I was given permission to let my imagination play with the design (and it can be dangerous sometimes, jk!), I decided to go with girly colors and wild design.

I love zebra prints.

A few cupcakes accomapnied the order. I decorating cupcakes in two or even three tones of color. I think that has become my signature docoration on them.

The cake is a White Caramel Cake with Dulce de Leche buttercream and it is covered in a marble mix of soft pink and white.

This bunch is a cute one because they were created to be the toppers for baby shower cupcakes.

I always ask customers to see if  they have any ideas, designs or patterns in mind so I can figure out what to do with their request. I received this blanket picture with the baby animals.

Here are the cupcakes with the baby animal toppers.

Giraffes, tigers, elephants, monkeys, parrots, oh my!

And of course my daughter Lillie asked me if I was going to make animals girls. So, I added eye lashes to some elephants.

What do you think? My husband liked them a lot and my boy Noah said “Wow” when he saw the first chocolate pieces.

As far as the cupcake flavors, we had chocolate butter cupcakes with chocolate ganache filling and strawberry cupcakes with fresh strawberries inside of them.

Here’s the wonderful comment from my customer.

“You did a wonderful job on the cupcakes!  They were SO cute!  And a big hit with everyone at the baby shower (even the men).  People raved about the edible decorations and the chocolate filling.  Thanks so much for all your hard work and talent!”

Big Thanks!!!

First Communions and Confirmations are happening now everywhere and that is always a very happy occasion to celebrate. I was glad to prepare treats for a few people from my church, St. Francis of Assisi. Here are some of them.

The follwing cupcakes are for a little girl that is not too much into ‘cake’, but she was more than happy to try my Red Velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

The cupcakes are topped with a small white chocolate lavander & white cross.

We also prepared a platter of cake balls in White/Caramel cake with Dulce de Leche buttercream mixed. Some of the were covered in chocolate and some with a sugar glaze.

More first communion treats are coming…