Wedding Shower Cupcakes and Cookies

Hey viewers!

I made the cupcakes and cookies for a cousin's wedding shower, and here they are! I meant to post these a long time ago...but college has been really busy for me so oh well haha! Anyway, the wedding colors were pink and white so that's what I wanted to use for the cupcakes and cookies. I think they turned out nice and everyone at the wedding shower loved them and went crazy over them!

This was the arrangement of all of the cupcakes and cookies I made for the shower!

These are some of the regular-sized cupcakes I made. I made vanilla and strawberry cupcakes both with vanilla buttercream icing, and all of the flower decorations were made out of gum paste! Gum paste is similar to fondant (but I just like gum paste better) and uses the same tools as fondant too. The decorations were really easy to make and honestly only require VERY basic skills with gum paste. They basically only required dying the gum paste, flattening it out, cutting it with little flower cutters, and then placing the flowers on the cupcakes.

TIP for gum past decorations: DO NOT put the decorations on the cupcakes way ahead of time or place them in sealed containers with the cupcakes or they will absorb the moisture and soften up, and the colors might bleed depending on what colors you use. I added the flower decorations to the cupcakes in the hour before the wedding shower but I made them days in advance!

I used plain white cupcake liners for all of the cupcakes, and the for all of the regular-sized cupcakes I added another white cupcake liner after baking the cupcakes and letting them cool. I hate when cupcake liners start out pretty and then turn greasy looking and the same color as the cupcake! Sooo, I wanted to fix that and make my cupcakes look a little more elegant...to do this I flattened out white cupcake liners, folded them each in four spots (fold shown above) for each cupcake to make them tight on the cupcakes and glued the folds, whole punched on each of the four folds, and then threaded pink ribbons through and tied them off! This took a while and definitely wouldn't be a project you could expect to complete in 30 minutes for 100 cupcakes, but they turned out really nice! Also, it would be fairly manageable if you were making just a batch or two of cupcakes!

These are some of the mini cupcakes I made! They turned out so cute and I didn't even think they needed extra white cupcake liners added to hide the cake colors. I iced them using a leaf icing tip to create five flower petals on each cupcake, which is actually super easy once you practice it a few times. Then I just added a few candy pearls (white and pink, of course!) and they ended up being so adorable!

These are some of the cookies I made for the wedding shower! I used a sugar cookie recipe that I found online (one that said it was good for using cookie cutters and for decorating) and cut the cookies using a tiered cake, dress, and big heart cookie cutter! I used a royal icing that I made to outline the cookies, allowed the outlines to dry and harden, and then flooded the cookies with a thinned royal icing. You can find LOTS of tips and tutorial videos for doing this online. It's fairly easy to do as long as you get the icing consistency right for the flooding and the outlining! After flooding the cookies with icing I added candy pearls to some of the cookies (before the icing hardened) and then after I gave the icing time to harden I was able to add other icing decorations (using the same royal icing used to outline the cookies)!

I ended up making over 50 cookies haha! And they were so big so we had lots left over.

Well I hope that looking at my pictures and information about the wedding shower cupcakes and cookies sparks some ideas for cupcakes and cookies you can make, or that you at least enjoyed looking at the pictures! haha Happy baking and party planning!

-Rebecca

Easter Cupcakes

Hey viewers!

I was looking through my pictures from the last few months and I came across pictures of the cupcakes I made for a family gathering on Easter. I thought I should post some pictures of them on here so here they are! Everyone went crazy over these cupcakes and they really weren't that difficult to make. Icing colors and cute decorations will do wonders!

I made the decorations out of gum paste but they could also easily be made out of fondant or something else!

These little icing flowers on the mini cupcakes were fun! You can use a Wilton icing tip #102, #103, or #104 to make the petals and then add a little dot of icing to the center.

 Well I hope you like my cupcakes and I hope you want to make your own now! Let me know if you have any comments or questions!

-Rebecca

Spring/Easter Party

Hey viewers! This is a little Spring/Easter party that I had over spring break. The decorations and snacks were a lot of fun to make, so I hope that you all enjoy my ideas!

Different flavors of fruit punch come in great colors that are perfect for spring!

Sherbet also comes in great colors for spring and Easter! Everyone loved this!

Cheese and crackers are always great party snacks.
They are also great for making spring shapes with cookie cutters!

I saw an egg-shaped cake pan on sale and just had to get it for making Easter egg cakes. Cupcakes are always fun but sometimes it's just faster and easier to make one, big cake instead!

These are mints that I made for the party. Everyone always loves these mints and you can make them into anything! They are fairly easy to make and then you can just add coloring and cut them into whatever shapes you want!

You can also mold the mint dough into whatever you want! These little chicks and eggs are pretty easy to make, and the eyes and decorations on the eggs are just sprinkles.

I always want to have a candy bar at my parties, but they can be so expensive and  a waste if you aren't having tons of people at your parties. So, I decided to have a mini candy bar! I bought these glass jars and bowls at the Dollar Tree and filled them with cute candy. This was great because it didn't cost a fortune and I didn't get stuck with pounds of left-over candy!

I made these cute garland decorations for the table out of colored tissue paper! The pretty painted flower decorations can be found at craft stores.

I put this cute little table beside the food table since
there wasn't enough room on the big table for the
plates, napkins, and treat boxes. The treat boxes
were really cute and I just put a few pieces of candy
 in them and then let guests fill them up with candy
 from the mini candy bar!

I hope that you are all able to use some of my ideas! Have a happy Easter and a happy spring! Thanks for looking at my blog and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!

-Rebecca

More Valentine's Day Party Ideas and Pictures

Hey viewers! Valentine's Day is right around the corner so I decided to do another post with just a few more ideas and some more pictures from my Valentine's Day party. I hope you all enjoy them!

Here are two more pictures from my Valentine's Day party that I talked about in my last post:

pink and white cotton candy

white chocolate Lindor truffles

I wanted to mention that containers really change the look of their contents and that they can easily make their contents look more appealing. The cotton candy came in a blue bag which obviously did not go well with my pink and white table so I found some clear glass jars that looked great with the other dishes and glasses. The Lindor truffle wrappers were gold and gold was not in my Valentine's Day party color scheme, so a quick fix was taking them out of the wrappers and dropping them into cute glasses that matched the rest of the table.

And here are some new things:

It is fairly easy to make letters and shapes out of cheese slices and they make for really cute snacks! Cookie cutters would be perfect for this but I just used a butter knife to cut out these shapes.

I had this little mailbox at my Valentine's Day party but I didn't know what to do with it so I just sat it in the middle of the dining room table. I later realized that it was perfect for holding candy, either as a centerpiece on a table or as a party favor. I bought this mini mailbox for only $1.00 so it would be great to give something like this as a party favor so that guests would still have something from the party once the candy was gone.

If I were going to use a candy-filled mini mailbox as a centerpiece for a table then I would probably go for having all of one type of candy, like the red M&Ms. For a party favor though, I would probably fill it with an assortment of candy like that shown in the picture above. It would also be nice to add Valentine's Day cards to candy-filled mini mailbox party favors! Well let me know if you have any comments or suggestions, and thanks for looking at my post!

-Rebecca

First Post/Valentine's Day Party

Hey viewers! This is my first post so hopefully people will like what I have to offer. Since it is close to Valentine's Day, I decided that the first party I post about should be a Valentine's Day party! I had this party for my family and a few friends of the family, and everybody seemed to love it. The best part was that it was fairly easy to put together and it was a lot of fun to work on!

This was my beautiful food table! Plastic tablecloths make things easy and they look nice, so don't be afraid to use them. I used pink and white ones for my Valentine's Day Party table. I wanted to raise my cupcake stand up and add depth to the table, so I put a cardboard box lid in the middle of the table and covered it with a white tablecloth that I used as a table runner. Rather than using all matching dishes, I decided to use a variety of white, silver, and clear glass dishes.

Strawberry Milk and Strawberry Lemonade

I had small glasses of strawberry milk and strawberry lemonade set out on the table for guests to take and then I had a pitcher of each for refills. I wasn't sure of the best way to make strawberry lemonade so I made regular lemonade and then added the strawberry syrup that was also used to make the strawberry milk. This actually made great strawberry lemonade and then I just added a strawberry to the side of each glass as a decoration!

Valentine's Day is a time for sweets and treats, but I knew that my guests would want more than just cookies and cupcakes. I didn't want to venture too far from the color scheme though so I had chips and salsa (red), crackers with turkey (pink) and cheese, and strawberries (red) and grapes.

I wanted a variety of good Valentine's day candy so I had M&Ms, candy conversation hearts, twizzlers, Lindor white chocolate truffles, and cotton candy. I picked out the red M&Ms since I wanted softer colors, like pink and white, on this table and then I was able to find bags of cotton candy that had several different colors of cotton candy in them. I picked out the pink and white to use on the table and left the other cotton candy for my family to eat after the party.

I love this white elephant and I thought it looked really nice on my pink and white Valentine's Day table!

I wanted to keep the cupcakes simple and pretty so I only used one icing color and no other decorations on top of the icing. I found it cute to decorate the cupcakes with two different icing techniques so that I could switch them off on the cupcake stand. I baked the cupcakes in red liners and then put white liners over the red ones after baking them so that the white liners would stay a vivid white and show a nice contrast with the red liners under them. I was able to use one of my lace doilies to make a liner for the cupcake at the top of the cupcake stand!

heart-shaped cookies

 These heart-shaped cookies were very easy to make so I thought I should share my secret on how to quickly make heart-shaped cookies. I hate fooling with cookie cutters and rolling out dough so I found an alternative that at least works for heart-shaped cookies. I bought the pre-portioned place and bake cookies that come with 24 cookies in a pack and used two cookie dough balls for each heart. I placed one ball of dough on wax paper, cut a second ball of dough in half, and placed these two pieces on the top left and top right of the other ball of dough. I then smashed them all down with my hand and shaped the dough into a general shape of a heart and placed it on a pan. After doing this to all of the cookie dough (making 12 heart cookies) I put them in the oven and waited for them to finish baking. Once they were done baking I took them out of the oven and immediately went to work on making them look like hearts. This was pretty easy but I had to make sure to work fast before they cooled off and made the shaping process difficult. For each heart I just used the edge of a knife to make the sides of the heart come to a point at the bottom and then I used it to push the center of the top of the cookie down to make the top of each heart. Since everyone doesn't like icing I only decorated the front 3 cookies with icing and this was still really cute.

These heart-shaped marshmallows and fruit tarts were a big hit. For the marshmallows I simply bought heart-shaped vanilla and strawberry flavored marshmallows and dipped them in melted white chocolate.  

For the fruit tarts I used pre-made pie crusts, frozen strawberries and blueberries, sweetened condensed milk, granulated sugar, and powdered sugar. I divided a pie crust dough into 18 balls of dough, rolled each ball of dough in powdered sugar, and then placed all of them in mini cupcake pans (with liners in them). I used a tart shaper on each one and made sure to coat it in powdered sugar so that the dough would not stick to the shaper tool. I then baked the crusts and put the frozen fruit in a pan on the stove top. I added sugar to the fruit and heated it while the tart crusts were baking. When the crusts were finished baking I added some of the fruit and a small amount of sweetened condensed milk to each one.

I made this cute garland out of heart-shaped doilies and ribbon!

This is the dining room table where I had people eat after getting their food!

 This is what each of my place settings looked like. I wanted to carry the heart-shaped doilies into the dining room so I put one under each plate. I used white paper plates but I put silver chargers under them because silver chargers always make place settings look nicer. I put the treat bags on the plates because they matched the table settings perfectly and because I didn't want guests to forget them!

table scatter

placecards

These place cards were pretty easy to make and so was the table scatter. For the place cards I just cut out card stock rectangles and folded them in half. I then printed out the names of all of the guests, glued them onto red wrapping paper rectangles that I cut out, and then glued these to the card stock rectangles. The table scatter hearts and the hearts that I put on the goody bags were cut out of pink and red wrapping paper like the place cards were.


Well I hope that you are all able to use some of my ideas and I hope that you all have awesome Valentine's Day Parties! Thanks for looking at my blog and I will be sure to make another post soon. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!

-Rebecca