you don't have to be Brave to eat cupcakes...

When I was a kid, there were chocolate bars of Pocahontas and The Lion King.  Now there are baby carrots and reusable green bags from Subway with Merida's face on them.  Green, healthy, BORING!  I want chocolate!!  So I took it upon myself to make Brave cupcakes.
Here I am happily mixing Merida's hair color:

I was worried about making Merida.  Her amazing hair was very hard to capture in frosting and candy.  I'm sure if I had a lot more time and a real frosting bag with interchangeable tips I could have made some squiggly, Chihuly-esque wonder in shades of red, yellow and orange.  But I was mixing colors in Dixie cups, and my most fancy piece of equipment is my offset spatula.  So I ended up with a girl in pigtails:

 

I tried using mini cupcakes in the gaps to make her hair bigger, but it just wasn't working.  The triplets were easier subjects!  The M&Ms looked just like curls, as I'd hoped.  But the pictures of them are with the bear cupcake and I'll be getting to that later.  In the meantime...

 
                                          

I made Merida's arrows out of thin pretzel sticks (the kind in individual snack boxes) and cut-up and shaped Starburst.  Red's my favorite, so it was hard to use these on cupcakes I wasn't eating (I ate the ones that broke.  And I ate one of the finished cupcakes later on :))  I cut the Starburst into little bowtie shapes (cut a triangle out of either side) and stuck the pretzels into the remaining triangles.  

I thought bullseyes were red, yellow, blue.  I watched a clip of Brave on YouTube to see how their bullseyes were.  Red, white, blue, white, black.  So that's what I did.  I got pretty frustrated cuz I wanted to use blue sanding sugar for the blue ring, but that was when I thought blue was the outer ring.  I was going to roll the sides in blue.  So I tried sticking blue on in little pinches in a circle.  It came out nice but frosting was easier.   So I made blue and put some of the sprinkles inside.

I did the old ziploc-frosting-bag trick I learned from Hello, Cupcake! a few years ago.  Fortunately I had red icing from an earlier project (Muppets).  I had chocolate frosting so I ziploc'd that too.  Ta-da:

Then I added the preztel arrows:

Arrowed!!  (that's a Teen Girl Squad reference for ya)

I was pretty proud of these!

After all this, the bears were much easier.   I frosted a chocolate cupcake and put on a few melting chocolates.  Then I put blue M&Ms on the melts with icing as glue for the eyes (it wasn't till I saw the movie that I realized the mother bear has brown eyes) and brown icing as the nose. 

And, even though this picture's darker, it had flash so it gives the little flecks of white like in normal cartoon eyes:

 

Oh how cute!  Haha.  I was actually going to make 3 of these as the 3 little bears but I ran out of chocolate melts.  I turned to the mini cupcakes I had standing by, and the chocolate morsels, and made these:

 3 actual little bears!  It was all so fun.  So here's one of the bears with the triplets:

 Yay!  So finally I frosted 2 cupcakes with vanilla and covered them in blue sprinkles and piped "be BRAVE" onto them:

So here they are all together:

Yay!  And here I am with them :)

Here's that bullseye with the sprinkles I was telling you about, on the top right corner:

I boxed some up for my friends Kim & Jeff since they were my double date to the movie.  I just adore these fold-up boxes I got from AC Moore.  I felt so professional!

The movie was great!  It's a real mother-daughter movie, which I wasn't aware of.  I would have seen it with my mom, otherwise!  But it was fun, and I suggest you stay till after the credits ;)