Summer is Here!

Yay summer! I'm so excited to go to the beach every day and not go to school :) This means I have more time to make cupcakes and desserts, but it's also kind of sucky with the weather being so hot. It makes the frosting sticky and soupy and the fondant is always a mess. But anyway, to celebrate the start of summer I made these cute cupcakes over Memorial Day Weekend. I used some cake mix, fruit slices, raisinets, chocolate frosting, vanilla frosting, graham crackers, pretzel sticks, ice cream cones, a little bit of corn syrup, food coloring, and gum. Optional: edible markers and goldfish. I got both of these ideas from the book What's New, Cupcake? which I totally recommend buying, I love it.

For the ant cupcakes I died some of the vanilla frosting green and then spread that onto the cupcakes. Then, I took the raisinets and looked for the biggest ones to line up three in a row on each cupcake. Then, for the ant's legs, I took the chocolate frosting and just piped the legs. For the watermelons, I cut the green and pink ones along the white line and then stuck the green thin piece to the pink half circle piece and then drew some seeds onto it with the chocolate frosting. Then I just threw some frosting onto the watermelons and stuck them onto the backs of some of the ants. I made about 5 watermelons and I cut one of them in half and put those halves on some ants too.

I didn't want to make just all ants, so half of them I made into sand castles. I did this by covering the cupcakes with vanilla frosting and then covering them with crushed graham crackers. I made some mini cupcakes so that I could stack them on top of the bigger ones to make it look like real castles. Next, I used a little corn syrup to spread onto the ice cream cones and then put some crushed graham crackers onto it. Then I cut the gum to look like a waving flag and drew on it with some edible markers, but you don't have to do that. Then I used frosting to stick the gum flags to the pretzels, but it would be easier to use melting chocolate so that it will actually stay. Then I stuck some of the flags and ice cream cones in 

random places. I also threw some goldfish around the edges of some of the castles.

And there you go, now you have some ants and a sand castle, perfect for summer.

Spring!

Hey, so I haven't blogged in a very long time. It's already summer and the last time I blogged was during Christmas time. So anyway, during lacrosse season I made these Spring flower cupcakes for one of the games. They're really easy to make, they just require a lot of time.

So all I did to make these was whip up a batch of cupcakes and frost them with plain vanilla frosting. Then I took mini marshmallows, a bag will do, and started cutting them in half at an angle. It got pretty sticky, so be prepared. Then I took the sticky side of the marshmallow halves and stuck that into a dish of sprinkles. Then I just stuck the "petal" onto the flower and kept doing that until I got a full flower. I worked my way from the outside in and used about 27 petals per flower. Then I stuck a little non parel in the middle of the flower on some of them and left some of them plain. Each flower took a long time to make, so I decided since I was low on time to use some other candies I had like M&Ms and licorice to make other flowers too.

Use a bunch of different sprinkles, different colors and even different shapes like the colorful circle ones in the picture above. They could come out really cool.

I also went a little crazy and threw some big marshmallows into the mix, like the red one above.