Mommy & Me Cupcakes

I am often asked by my friends and co-workers how the heck I have time to do all this decorating and what not with a toddler running around. To this I usually laugh and respond that I burn the candle at both ends and rely heavily on a schedule.  I manage most of my decorating for customers early in the morning, nap times and at night time.  I do like to spend several evenings with my husband curled up on the sofa watching T.V. and I try my best to take a couple nights a week to do so. Occasionally I do have things that I need  get done while my daughter is up running around and you can usually find her right beside me and wanting to be all up in it.  I recently purchased this adorable cupcake set from Melissa & Doug and I  let her go to town decorating while I am doing whatever tasks I need to get done.

This set comes with 4 cupcakes, washable markers, ("icing") and birthday candles.  I also give her some of my extra fondant to play with.  She loves drawing, re-drawing and adding fondant accents to the cupcakes.   I highly recommend this product for any active toddler because this keeps them busy for quite sometime!

Yes, that's green "icing" all over her face.

                                            

The end result.

                                                             
Sometimes it just isn't enough to decorate fake cupcakes and you need the real thing!  So recently I held a Mommy & Me cupcake class at a craft store.  I am a Wilton cake instructor and love that you can teach specialty classes and gear them toward a specific audience and theme.   Since my daily life is focused around a 2.5 year old I figured why not get some of her little friends together and let them go crazy playing with cupcakes, candy and icing! For this class I tried to pick simple and easy cupcake designs for the toddlers. I settled on ladybugs, turtles, rainbows, Easter bunnies, and shamrocks.  The mommies were asked to bring 8 to12 un-iced cupcakes along with a few other supplies.  I purchased several different candies, gave a few quick directions and let them get to work.  I was actually amazed at how well they paid attention and took direction. 
                                  

They practiced their icing technique.

                                                   

They worked on their piping skills.

They even rolled out fondant!

TA-DA!! This was the end result after 2 hours of non-stop cupcake decorating!!

And this is me and my munchkin and only a small taste of the mess she made. This picture was also taken BEFORE all the sugar kicked in!  Needless to say she missed a nap that day and was up way past her bedtime, but it was so worth it!

Yay for Leap Day!

So it's no secret to any of my family or friends that I love a holiday, special occasion, event or any reason to be crafty and pull out my hot glue gun and glitter pens.  I was pretty excited when I was asked to make some Leap Day cupcakes for a friend and decided to use a play on words and make some fondant frogs on top of buttercream cupcakes. I found the inspiration for these on Cake Central from another cake decorator.

After making these cupcakes it immediately got me thinking about what else I could do for this day that only comes once every four years.  I didn't have to look far because my inbox was soon flooded with ideas.  I have subscribed to several great crafting blogs and apparently Leap Year was on every one's mind this week. The first idea I ran across came from Busy Bee Kids Crafts and was super simple and perfect for my 2 year old. I had all the supplies on hand and decided to give it a whirl. Here is what you need:

Glue

Green (Washable) Paint and brush

Red pipe cleaner

Green construction paper

White paper plate

2 white pom-poms for eyes

We first outlined her sweet little hands.

Then she painted the white paper plate green. (P.S. I always cover my kitchen table in newspaper when paint or Play-Doh is involved. Ekk!)

Then we attached the green hands, pipe cleaner mouth and pom-pom eyes and viola, a fun leap day frog!

 Easy peasy right?!

The next idea came from my recent obsession with Pintrest! I like everyone else have hopped on the Pintrest bandwagon and have found so many fun ideas!!! If your not already following me on Pintrest you can find the link in the upper left hand corner of my blog.  Anyhow back to the project! If you have a toddler then you know that they are super picky eaters and want pasta the majority of the time! (At least my toddler does.) I however have found that she will eat almost any vegetable if it is covered in ranch dressing.  So with that little helpful bit of info I serve almost every vegetable with ranch dressing!! (I honestly would not mind if it was covered in ketchup as long as she is eating a vegetable I am happy!)  A couple weeks ago I ran across a picky kids lunch blog and I was excited to find another use for my cookie cutters besides cookies!! So using these cookie cutters this is what I came up with.  Of course the frog and crown would have looked a lot cuter if it was a spinach tortilla but I wasn't about to truck it up to the store for green tortillas.  I have also found that putting food inside of cupcake liner is a huge crowd pleaser with my toddler and she automatically thinks its fun!

Thanks for stopping by!

Happy Crafting,

Jennifer