Top o'the Mornin' to ya! Leprechaun Hat Cupcakes

We decided that just in case anyone wants to use the ideas from the blog, we should make things at least a few weeks in advance. So in honor of St. Patrick's Day we created Aerie's Lucky Leprechaun Lids. We started with a couple of different sizes of baking cups. In the largest we put only a thin layer of batter. These are what we used to make the brim of the hats. The bowl of the hat was just a slightly smaller baking cup. One piece of advice, it is best if you use a significantly smaller cup for the top than the brim.
After the baking things had cooled, we frosted all the cake parts green and stuck brim and bowl together.
The hatband we made with rolled fondant (of course) we cut strips with the pizza cutter, then hand cut the buckles and shamrocks for the top.

Sweet Heart Cupcakes

Sunday February 1, 2009
This project is pretty simple. We decided that we wanted to make some cupcakes look like the conversation heart candies. We decided to use fondant for the hearts, and write on them with regular icing ( Aerie says that she just really wanted to play with fondant again since the blue ribbon cupcakes were so much fun).








We started by baking the cake and cupcake. Pretty much standard following directions here. Then we covered the cupcakes in white frosting, and colored the fondant pink and purple. In case you have haven't yet played with fondant, basically you can buy or make white fondant and then simply add a few drops of food coloring to a small ball and knead it in your hands until the fondant (and your hands) are the right color. As a quick tip, you can achieve a neat marble look to the fondant if you just stop kneading while the color is still partially mixed.
Next we rolled out the fondant into a thin sheet. You really can get the fondant quite thin and still get a cool result. We have found that for small shapes, it works well to make it about the thickness of a dime.
Once the fondant is rolled, take a heart shaped cookie cutter and cut out the heart shapes, place them on the cupcakes, and using the smallest tip from your cake decorating set (we use a Wilton's set that Aerie got from her Grandma Sally) write the classic heart candy phrases.
For the cake, we just frosted it and used various tips to add edges, and writing to the cake.
Nothing too fancy, but just right for some February fun.