Personalized Cupcake Toppers

I love cupcake toppers.

My obsession with them started a couple months ago when I was getting ready for my son's first birthday party.  My plan was to make cupcake favors with a personalized topper with his initial on it.  In the past I've bought toppers from our local cake supply store, but there is nothing I love more than the feeling of accomplishment so I decided to try my hand at making some of my own.  After much research, I decided to make them out of marshmallow fondant and I think overall were a success for a first time attempt. 

Anyhow, my friend, Hannah, owns a birthday party decorating business called 1st Dol and she did an amazing job decorating my son's first birthday party.  This week I will try to return the favor by making a few cupcakes for her son's first birthday party this weekend.

Here is a peak at the toppers I made for his cupcakes.  I'm quite smitten with them because my Tappits and I are finally starting to get along. :)

Cupcake Glamour Shots!

My dear friend, Alyssa, came over a couple weeks ago to photograph some of my cupcakes.  She has many talents, but at the top of that list is photography!  It was our good friends' son's 1st birthday and I made some cupcakes for his party.  Here are couple shots that Alyssa took:

chocolate cupcakes w/ cream cheese frosting

pumpkin cupcakes w/ cream cheese frosting

coconut cupcakes w/ cream cheese frosting

A Childhood Favorite

One of my favorite childhood memories comes from when I was about 7 or 8 years old.  My mom dropped my younger sister and I off at our school's fun fair for a couple hours (how times have changed since then) and the first game we stopped at was a cake walk.  Basically, it was like musical chairs, but standing up on a big game board.  When the music stopped, if you were standing on the spot the caller picked, then you would win one of these homemade cakes.  Well, as luck would have it, I won!  A 13x9  yellow cake iced with chocolatey goodness, complete with rainbow non-pariel sprinkles.  No doubt it came from a box and the icing from a store bought tub, but to my 8 year old self I had hit the jackpot!  I remember proudly carrying the cake around from game to game and savoring every morsel when we finally got to dig in to it....

Anyhow, I digress.  The reason I took a walk down memory lane was to introduce one of my favorite cupcake/frosting combinations, my childhood favorite reincarnated and a classic, for sure, the vanilla cupcake topped with chocolate icing and non-pariel sprinkles...

It was one of my girlfriend's birthday last week so I whipped up some of these for her birthday brunch.  (See my previous post for the recipes.)

Everything looks so much prettier with ribbon. :-)

I recently read a neat tip on CakeJournal.com about how to get a vanilla cupcake to have a nice dome.  (Btw, if you haven't checked out this blog you must, it is filled with great tutorials and tips!)  For me, my chocolate cupcakes always rise beautifully but my vanilla cupcakes always seem to spill over and have the dreaded flat "muffin top".  Anyhow, the suggestion was instead of mixing the room temperature butter with sugar in the beginning, mix the sugar with eggs first and then add melted butter to the milk.  I tried this tip to make these cupcakes and they did indeed give the cupcakes a beautiful dome.  However, I found that it changed the consistency of the cupcake a bit (the texture was bit spongy?). 

Anyone have any foolproof tips on getting a beautiful cupcake dome?

Cupcake Medley

Recently our church held an event to raise money for summer missions.  I decided to donate some homemade goodness for the event.  I came up with "Cupcake Medley" -- a variety pack of four different cupcakes (all of my favorites).

Here are the cupcakes all dolled up and ready to go!  The medley included....

devil's food cupcake topped with creamy chocolate icing and chocolate garnish

vanilla cupcake topped with strawberry frosting

coconut cupcake topped with cream cheese icing and coconut shavings (note: I made the Neely's coconut cupcake and topped with Paula Deen's cream cheese icing, which is my go-to favorite icing!  Tastes delicious with everything!)

and last, but not least, vanilla cupcake topped with cream cheese icing and sprinkles.

Boxed up and ready to go!  I've linked all the recipes I used, except for the vanilla cupcake, which I adapted from the Magnolia Bakery's vanilla birthday cake recipe.  I'll post my version of the recipe some other time!