What's new, Cupcake?

Crazy as it may seem, the vast majority of my emails come from baking sites - either blogs or online stores. I know, shocking, right? Just before Easter I got an email from a store that featured the new book, "What's new, Cupcake?" The email featured a photo of the cutest flower cupcakes I had ever seen and I just had to make them. They were a bit time consuming but as far as the skill factor? As long as you could use a scissors and arrange things in a circle, you were good to go!

You don't even need a recipe to make these cuties. All you need are cupcakes, frosting, mini marshmallows, colored sugar, and either chocolate coated sunflower seeds or mini chocolate chips. Frost your cupcakes and set them aside. If you need to, feel free to do a taste test. You know, just for quality control.

Pour your colored sugar into some bowls or saucers - 1 color each, and snip some marshmallows diagonally over the bowl and let them fall into the sugar. The cut side will be coated with the sugar and just arrange them, sugar side up, onto the cupcake in circles. Once you get to the middle, you can either use the sunflower seeds or the chocolate chips for the flowers center. Or just stick another marshmallow in and you're done.

Cute and easy!

Wedding Favors

A couple of months ago a good friend of my husband's asked me if I knew of anything she could do bake and make herself as a wedding favor. Since she is the bride, I couldn't very well just let her make all of these cookies herself when she also had a new baby at home. She is having an Asian inspired wedding and asked for a cookie with 3 tiers and flowers. Simple, yes? I drew up a design and scanned it over and we settled on a cookie with different sized flowers scattered across the cake and "ribbons" at the base of each tier. I didn't really want to pipe and flood all the cookies (hey, it takes FOREVER...and I'm not very good at it yet) so we also decided on MMF instead of royal icing and the accents would be made out of Fondarific. Good? Good! So this is what we came up with:


This was the size comparison - the left is a 3" cookie, and the right is 4". I like the tiers better on the larger cookie myself but the bride likes the 3" cutter, though so that is what we are using. It's by Wilton if you are interested and comes as a set of 4 wedding themed cutters.

However, genius that I am (this is being typed with a hugely exaggerated eyeroll,) while shopping recently I found something that I like better and have now pretty much scrapped this entire plan only to replace it with a much more time consuming cookie. Ugh. Someone shoot me. I need to know when to just leave it alone. I mean, these cookies are cute, right? Of course, these were just playing around so the actual favors would have been much neater and more consistent. I am now going back to the drawing board to figure out how long these new cookies are going to take me. BTW, yes, I do have issues but the new ones really look good!

To be continued...