Allie's pink ladybug cake

My good friend Heather's daughter celebrated her 3rd birthday this weekend and I got to make the cake! For kids that age you need to feed/entertain the kids AND their parents, so the cake was big enough for everyone. 12" with a layers of chocolate and vanilla cake, filled with a thin layer of melted bittersweet chocolate and chocolate buttercream, covered in vanilla buttercream.

When asked, Allie said she wanted, "Ladybugs, pink ladybugs..... and black spiders." You can see I listened to half of her request. They're made from gumpaste and the letters are funky lowercase Tappits (I have the uppercase ones too, but they're kind of a pain to use - they're just too big!)

One last thing - my 3 yr old son takes after me and LOVES dessert. He takes his time, and loves to savor every bite. Check out the last man standing in the party room.

Eliza's ladybug cupcakes

Eliza turned 5 last week and wanted ladybug (lady bug?) cupcakes. The whole time I made them this song was running through my head.

Started with chocolate cupcakes. NOTE TO SELF: Before attempting to make really red buttercream at 9:30pm at night, remember to check if you have enough food coloring so ladybugs are really RED, not pink! It managed to turn out ok, the color definitely intensified overnight, but I still forget how much red food coloring it takes to make buttercream red instead of dark pink!

Hard at work. Made the black by mixing both cocoa and melted chocolate into the buttercream, and then adding black food coloring.

Almost finished, but I thought something was missing.

They needed these - orange antennae (antennas?). Orange because I love orange. Made with melted white chocolate discs (that are absolutely gross, I think, but it doesn't need to be tempered, which makes life so much easier!)

Finished!

As the birthday girl, Eliza got a bigger cupcake, the mommy of the group.