http://www.flickr.com/photos/cakegirl/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Here’s an idea for decorating baby shower cupcakes, which may not be original but which can’t go wrong. The photo shows cupcakes with fondant icing and small sugar flowers as additional decorations to the baby faces. However, you don’t have to use fondant if you don’t want to. Your homemade cupcake icing can be as good, if not better, because you know exactly what ingredients you’ve been using to make it. As for the letters, you can buy a pack of those candy cake decorations, like the ones we’ve illustrated here below or some Haribo Gummi candy alphabet letters.

Cake Mate Candy Cake Decorations

These letter-shaped candies come in a pack of 12 alphabet sets, four sets for each of the following colors: pink, yellow and blue. That’s good, because if you have a lot of guests, you may need to bake several dozens of cupcakes for your baby shower party, therefore you’ll make use of a lot of letters.

Before decorating the cupcakes with letter toppings, you’d better make a sort of arrangement scheme on paper, in order to be able to count how many instances of each letter you need for creating the words you want. Of course, you’ll want to write “baby” at least once, but you can also write other things such as your favorite baby names, some vows or even short quotes from your favorite poems.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristinausk/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Using only letters can quickly become boring, so you may want to alternate “text” cupcakes with “image” ones. You can use hard sugar cupcake decorations to make flowers or some multicolor sprinkles for creating some pieces of mouth watering art. Just look at tis example of cupcakes for a baby girl baby shower party: they surely are cute, especially the ones topped with big pink flowers.

The cupcake frosting for this kind of toppers can be either white, cream or some other pale color. Dark colors may not be such a great idea, so it’s better perhaps to avoid them. There are no special cupcake recipes for baby shower. Any cupcake batter will do, so you can take any recipe you like and instead of its common icing use the themed decorations.

Ladybug Cupcakes Hard Sugar Decorations

Back to our ladybug cupcakes, here’s an example of edible hard sugar decorations available on Amazon for as little as $6.58 for 16 pieces. Made 100% from sugar and food coloring, these decorations are Kosher certified and safe for children’s consumption. Even so, children parties should be closely supervised by adults, because a small child could choke with such decorations if left unattended.
The sugar ladybugs are 1 inch in size, so each cupcake would probably accommodate only one on top of it. Nonetheless, if you decide to use the decorations for a bigger cake, you can arrange the cute little bugs around some hard sugar flowers. The effect on your little party guests is guaranteed.

Crazy Bug Flexible Silicone Pan

This flexible silicone baking pan allows you to bake not only ladybug-shaped cupcakes, but also butterflies, bees and dragonflies. Just prepare your favorite cake butter or muffin mix, pour it into the mold, bake it and add some colorful icing to reproduce the various bugs’ looks. The kids would be sorry to eat their dessert because they will want to keep it. This cupcakes pan measures 10 3/4” x 8 ¼” x 1 1/4″, it is dishwasher safe and can be used in the hot oven up to 450 F. One pan bakes 8 cupcakes, muffins or gelatin figures.

Ladybug Cupcake Boxes

These paper boxes are great for kids parties, if you want to send your guests home with a sweet treat. This way, they will remember the great time they spent at your party. The boxes are made from thick paper and they feature an adjustable insert which allows cupcakes to remain undamaged. The price is $3.99 for a set of four ladybug cupcakes boxes. They are just so sweet!

In this article, I want to show you a few ideas of decorating your cupcakes for Easter. The cupcakes themselves will be baked following your preferred recipes, with chocolate, vanilla, bananas or whatever other flavor you may like.

Assorted Edible Candy Confetti Sprinkles

These candy confetti sprinkles are available on Amazon for the price of $2.69 the 1.5 oz. jar. Being edible, they are perfect for cupcake decorating in case there are children amongst your dinner guests. The jar contains a mix of candies in shapes of little ducks, chickens and bunnies, in various pale colors such as blue, pink, orange, yellow and white. The candies are certified Kosher and they contain the following ingredients: sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (cottonseed, soybean), dextrin, soy lecithin, corn starch, carnauba wax, confectioners glaze, natural and artificial flavors and artificial coloring.

The Easter Cakes Decoration Sugar Pantry 1 Kit

This decoration kit has really cute items, but some of them could be a bit too big for cupcakes topping. Anyway, this is what you get for your $25.81:

• 3 bunny heads edible hard sugar decorations (2 inches, colors blue, pink and yellow)
• 4 beau bunny heads with bow ties (smaller, perfect for decorating Easter cupcakes)
• 4 chicks sugar shapes (1-1/2 inches, all yellow)
• 6 carrots sugar shapes (2 inches, orange carrots, green leaves)
• 3 large Easter eggs sugar shapes (2-1/2 inches, various decorations)
• 12 smaller speckled Easter eggs
• 15 lily flowers sugar shapes
• 18 Easter mini charms edible hard sugar decorations (great for cupcakes topping)

All sugar shapes in this Easter decoration kit are made 100% from sugar with certified food coloring. Before buying, make sure to read the product label, because they may contain small amounts of other things such as soy protein, egg whites, modified food starch, guar gum, Trietryl Citrate, wheat flour or barley flour. These edible decorations are certified Kosher.

Wilton Floral Collection Flower Making Set

If you want to make your own cupcake toppers, you could use one of these sets which will help you make gum paste flowers that look quite realistic. The set includes 24 plastic cutters, a leaf mold, 2 foam squares for modeling, 3 modeling tools and a book with instructions for use and cake decoration ideas. The set is designed to be used with gum paste, but it works with fondant, too. It’s fairly easy to use, but sophisticated models like roses may require some practice before they come out perfect. Anyway, cutting your own Easter cupcakes decorations is an excellent opportunity to involve the children in the dinner preparations, thus enabling them to develop their craft skills.

Cupcake ingredients:

1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
5 tablespoons melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vinegar
3 tablespoons cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup water

Baking the cupcakes:

Mix all dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Make a hole in the mixture and add the wet ingredients: the teaspoon vanilla, the teaspoon vinegar and the melted butter. Now pour in 1 cup water over it all. Mix well.

Spoon the cupcake batter into a lined cupcake tin, making sure to fill the cups only by two thirds.  Bake the cupcakes in the oven at 350 F. They should be done in about 30 minutes, but it would be good if you checked them after 20-25 minutes. Try one with a toothpick – if it comes out clean, then cupcakes are done, you can take them out. There’s no need to buy special Easter liners for these cupcakes, because you’re going to give them the bunny-face frosting, so the cupcake lining won’t be that visible. Just simple, plain liners would be very good.

This bakes 12 cupcakes. The frosting ingredients that follow are also calculated for 12 cupcakes.

Bunny face frosting ingredients:

• White icing
• Shredded coconut
• Pink decorating sugar
• Pink jelly candies
• Blue or green small, round candies
• 24 big marshmallows
• 48 small marshmallows
• One tablet of plain milk chocolate, melted

Method:

Apply the frosting evenly over the cupcake top, then dunk the cupcake into the shredded coconut bowl, for making the fluffy bunny face. For making the bunny ears, use a pair of kitchen scissors to cut the marshmallows, then shape the pieces with your fingers until they get a rabbit ear shape. You’ll see that the surface resulted from the cut is all sticky. Dunk it into the pink decorating sugar: you’ve just made the nice, pink interior of the bunny ears. Apply the ears on the cupcake, as shown in the video below. A pink jelly bean will make the cute bunny nose. Two blue or green dot candies will make the eyes. Two smaller marshmallows will make the bunny cheeks. The lady in the video then uses black decorating gel to make the eye pupils and pink decorating gel for the bunny whiskers. I like doing those with melted chocolate. I just use a cake decorating syringe, fill it with melted chocolate then make the pupils and the rabbit whiskers. Maybe I’m a little bit conservative, but I tend to avoid using food colorants, decorating gels and other such stuff, because I fear they might be harmful.

Here’s the Easter cupcakes video: