Easter Cupcakes!

A while back, my mom gave me this wonderful book called "Hello, Cupcake!" It contains recipes for cupcakes and various kinds of frosting, but most importantly it gives step-by-step instructions for creating themed cupcakes. There are butterfly cupcakes, shark cupcakes, baby shower cupcakes, Christmas ornament cupcakes, cupcakes that look like aliens or penguins or alligators... the list goes on and on. This Easter, I decided to attempt to make the book's featured Easter egg cupcakes. Keep in mind, the book is more about decoration than recipes for flavors (although I did use the vanilla cupcake recipe in the back to make the cupcakes themselves). All of the decorations are edible. So to start, with the help of my wonderful mother, I had to cut out honey graham crackers to look like Easter eggs.

Then began the tedious process of attaching the graham crackers to the cupcakes. Needless to say, cupcake tops aren't flat. And I learned that cream cheese frosting is not thick enough to really hold well, but we made it work. My friend Rachel, who works in food service for a living, graciously came over to assist with this part. We attached the grahams to the top of the cupcakes, and then began decorating.

We used pink & green colored sugar on the tops of some graham crackers. On others, we tinted dye using food-safe gel to make light purple, light blue, light pink, yellow, and green. We coated each graham in various pastel shades (except the hot pink sugar - it looked a little less vibrant in the package but shocked us with its intensity once on a cupcake), and then got to work decorating with an assortment of Easter-egg-esque designs. I ran into the same problem that I always run into when dying eggs - I only have so many patterns that I can do well. So some of the eggs ended up being a bit funky looking, while others actually turned out decently well. (That is, as long as I don't compare them to the picture in the book!) For the finishing touch, I piped light green frosting around the edges for grass, as if the Easter egg was lying in the grass (hmm... doesn't that sound so yummy?) Anyway, here is the end result:

And just for good measure, here's the picture from the book as to what they're actually supposed to look like:

Okay, so my grass looks more like monster hair than a sign of spring, but maybe by next Easter I'll have it all figured out:-)

Happy Easter!