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 ;)

halloween 2011!!!

I love Halloween! This year I made my first scarecrow! A few kids actually got scared (and so did I, twice in one day.. actually twice within 10 minutes!) which left me thoroughly satisfied. Planning for this holiday began early for me when I was at Party City and saw Wilton Icing Knives. I wasn't sure what I'd do with them, but I knew it was a good idea just to have them. Then my friend Jon posted this link to my facebook for Frankenstein marshmallow pops. I tried these out before Halloween:
Love those Wilton candy eyes!! I added silver sprinkles as the bolts. I also bought two Halloween magazines--Martha Stewart and Taste of Home. They always have great ideas. Yes, it would be a good Halloween.

Mike and I bought a build-your-own haunted gingerbread house kit from the grocery store.
It came with the walls of the house, black & orange icing, sprinkles, jelly beans, sugar ghosts, jack-o-lantern gumballs and candy corn.

Of course I got into the spirit of things by wearing my bunny ears (we always have some kind of costume lying around).


You can also see our cute Halloween dishtowel on the oven handle.
Well here's the house!
Then we decorated it:
Ooooooh! Spooky! All the icing was dripping off and the decorations (especially the jellybeans) were not sticking. Oh well! We kept it in the fridge that night. Here's what Mike put on the roof:

I thought it was a nice touch! Spooky spider! I took a picture of the 2 of us with our house:


That was that for the house. We almost forgot to bring it out for the party! The day of the party (or the day before, since the big crazy snowstorm pretty much snowed everyone in, giving me more prep time) I made the pretzel rod witch fingers. I got the mold at AC Moore and the candy melts at Michaels (and another bag at Reny's when we were visiting Portland, ME).

This was my first time using two different colored chocolate melts (actually they were both vanilla-flavored, I think) in one mold. They all say to use a brush, but I didn't want to buy a new paintbrush or use an older one even though I washed them... So I just used a spoon as usual but I was very careful, and wiped off a lot of the extraneous parts with a paper towel.

Oooh! They came out so good! :) I put them all together in a jar with some pumpkin pie-flavored popcorn (also from our Maine trip):
Then I made the cupcakes (which is what this blog is really about)!!
Yum! These were pumpkin spice cupcakes from the Sprinkles mix! What I love about Sprinkles is their mixes come in big tubes and have the recipe for from-scratch icing, so you can feel proud & say you made at least some of it from scratch. It also bakes 12 cupcakes, so if you're only expecting a small crowd, you don't have to eat the other 12 yourself ;)

Mike found the wrappers for me--I'd seen them at Stop & Shop and had been looking for them all month, until he found them at Shaw's (again, in Maine). My friend Katherine and I had just been talking about how some wrappers are so cute, but once you bake them, the oil seeps through and you can't see the cute decorations anymore (I think I mentioned this in the post I did about the malted cupcakes). Well these were tin AND in Halloween colors!

I had also bought this cardboard cupcake tower at Michaels. Mike helped me set it up and I put my cupcakes on it, along with the candy knives!

Spooooky! I also put some red icing dripping down the stabbed cupcakes, and on some extra knives I had.
Michaels also had these great wooden boxes in the shape of coffins! I bought two and painted them. I put a Hershey's mix inside and made a little gravestone:
Oh, I crack myself up!
Then I made the marshmallow Frankensteins! The hair kept making me laugh because they ended up looking like nice gentlemen instead of scary monsters.
I ran out of candy eyes :( so I used chocolate chips on some of them. I thought they looked like girls so I gave them red lips! The cool silhouette border is actually a bunch of cupcake wrappers connected to each other. They were part of Chef Duff's cake and cupcake line, but they were too big for my cupcakes. Here's a Frankenstein I gave the Flock of Seagulls haircut to:
We also had spooky cocktails!
I got the idea from Dylan's Candy Bar (which I will post about at a later date). Dylan Lauren has a book out and had these wax lips on the rim of a drink as a suggestion for a Halloween party! Duly noted, Dylan! This was garnishing a cocktail I came up with: pumpkin liqueur, light cream and marshmallow vodka. Yum! It was a party favorite :) I called it Pumpkin Cream. Or, actually, Pumpkin Scream (for Halloween).

Funny enough, the only thing I ended up getting out of the Martha Stewart magazine was the idea for hanging paper bats above the cocktail area.
There was a template and I cut them out of construction paper. How cute!!

And, of course, our costumes (including Mike's cats):

Chunks as a bull, I guess, with a cowboy riding on him! Or just a giant cat with a cowboy riding him... or a regular-sized cat with a tiny man...


My brothers, David (as a bunny) and Hiro (as a Japanese street vendor) with me (Peg Bundy):
And my friends Kim (as Edward Scissorhands) and Katherine (as Little Red Riding Hood)!
There were other friends who I didn't get pictures of, but it was a very fun night indeed. Hope you had a spooky and fun Halloween!!

a cup-ple of kisses

It began like this, how it usually begins:


My butter conundrum solved by my butter technique (the ziploc full of hot water sits on top of cut-up butter to soften it).. only this time there's also cream cheese.

Then there was the duty of stripping down the kisses:
Oh my! It's like they went for a mass-skinny dip! Where are all the little naked kisses?

Mmmm.. (I ate a few..) These didn't go into the mix--they went into the cups before the filling.

To be honest, I made these last month for Mother's Day, and I'd meant to post it here, but I was buried with school work.. so I don't remember what all the ingredients were, and I'm not sure where I put the Hershey's cookbook. So the next few will just be pictures. It looks delicious.

This:
became this:
And the butter and cream cheese were mixed with something else into this:
which became little balls of dough for the cups or tiny pie crusts. This part was especially fun because the dough was cool and squishy:

Just a few, which became:
a bunch, which I had to flatten into the mini-muffin tins:
Did I mention I love touching food?

Then I had to fill each cup with a kiss and some pecans (I think next time I'll omit the pecans--it was too crunchy for my taste):

Remember the chocolate-looking mixture from before? That gets poured into the cups:

I'm bad at cleanliness, sometimes. So my cupcake tins usually look like Jackson Pollocks before they go into the oven.

Voila!! They look really pretty.. and they tasted so good (if I do say so myself). My mom liked them too. Hope your Mother's Day was fun (a month ago)!!