Rachel's Guitar Cupcakes

Rachel is a singer in a rock 'n roll band (and a great person, to boot) and just celebrated a big birthday. We celebrated with guitar cupcakes. I used gumpaste for everything, except the frets, which were a last minute addition from royal icing.

He takes the best photos, doesn't he?

Olivia's Owl Cake and Cupcakes

I probably say/think/write this a lot, but Owls for Olivia is probably my favorite project. My style has always leaned more towards whimsical rather than realistic and this was definitely no exception. Olivia's favorite colors were purple and pink, so realism went right out the window!

I found some great line drawings of owls online and started from there. The decorations are all out of gumpaste or fondant and the letters are Tappits. Cake and cupcakes were vanilla bean cake with vanilla buttercream.

I want to do a whole cake covered in these "feathers"

I say this a lot, but these boxes and holders are the best.

baby owl

as usual, all photos taken by the lovely and talented Doug Schneider.

I realized today, after reading this post on the super cute My Owl Barn (for all owlovers), that I never blogged about these guys. Thanks for the mention and the reminder!

Sophia's bowling cupcakes

Sophia celebrated her 13th birthday at a bowling alley last weekend, and her mom wanted to surprise her with cupcakes to go along with the theme.

These bowling pins and balls are made from gumpaste. Little bowling pin cutters are hard to come by, so I took an old dreidel cutter, like this one, squeezed it until it resembled a pin and made a couple other tweaks to it as I went along.

The signature colors of the party were lime green, red and yellow.

Cupcakes with kids

I bake cupcakes for kids, but am not really good at baking cupcakes with kids, including my own. I get pretty ocd when I'm baking - things have to be done just the right way, in the just right order, etc., etc., and even thinking of adding lots of little hands into the mix makes me nervous!

Self-analysis over. My friend Debbie Koenig, the talented chef, teacher, blogger and food writer, may have shown me the light. She emailed me yesterday looking for inspiration about how to make Flicker cupcakes for her son. Since Flicker is a Disney character and we're a 100% Noggin household, I had no idea who he was. Turns out he's a very cute flashlight guy and is just perfect for piping on a cupcake.

I gave her my favorite vanilla buttercream recipe and some decorating ideas and the rest is baking-with-kids magic. Check out her post about the whole adventure here. Just might have to give it another try sometime:)

Maxie's (or Mets) Cupcakes

My sweet Maxie (a non-cupcake lover/eater, imagine that) turned 6 on June 8 and today he got to celebrate with his kindergarten class. He's a huge Mets fan and requested baseballs with a M on them. Actually, what he originally asked for was "a big green wall on each cupcake, with a baseball flying over it," but since he wasn't a paying customer I steered him in the direction of a ball with an M on it:)

Max and I agreed that there may be some people in his class who aren't Mets fans, including his teacher, so we told everyone, it's M for Max OR for Mets.

The circles and Ms are made from gumpaste, and I painted on the stripes with some powdered orange food coloring mixed with vodka. Have been looking for a reason to use the striped liners I got last year at Surfas, and I think these are a perfect combo.

Ready for their trip to kindergarten