Baby Shower Cupcakes

The ladies at our church (Winchester Corp Salvation Army) pitched in to throw a baby shower for a member that grew up in the church and I had the honor of making the cupcakes!
I found my inspiration on the web.

The ducky ones I found were used to advertise these cute cupcake wrappers. However, at $1 a piece, the wrappers were not even considered. Instead I made cupcake wrappers using doilies given to me by a friend. (Thanks, Gale)

I used a 12 inch doily to make the cupcake wrapper

picture courtesy of AlamoSweets on cakecentral.com


A lot of people must have liked the edible pearls shown in the duck picture above because they were sold out every place I looked. I decided to make my own using royal icing. I tried piping orbs but they did not come out perfectly round. After a few trial and errors, I found that letting the odd shapes dry for 2-4 minutes, I could round them using my index finger and palm. When they were completely dried, I tossed them in Super Pearl dust to give them a wonderful sheen.

Since the baby was going to be a boy, I went with blue frosting and pearls.


Here's the finished product. Cute, aren't they?

I found the ducks at http://stores.ebay.com/Monkey-Dog-Balloons. They were easy to work with and they shipped my order very quickly. They even combined the postal charges on multiple items I ordered. I like that!


I fell in love with this baby bird cupcake from Martha Stewart's web site.



Unfortunately, my birds turned out looking more like the Michelin man. I overheard one person asking her friend "Is this a frog?" Back to the piping board for me. :-D
I used tip #12 for the birds. Next time I'm going to make the birds using the coupler without a tip and use longer strands of coconut for the nest.


The daisies were made using gumpaste. It's a lot of fun to work with.... it's a lot like play dough. It brings the kid out in you.