Going on a Picnic!!

So me and my good-long time friend decided to have a picnic tomorrow with her kiddos! And of course this was great opportunity for me to create “Picnic” themed cupcakes! I instantly began drawing up ideas and looking through the book and online for neat and fun ideas. So I ended up doing 5 different designs- Mini-sunflowers (didn’t turn out so flowerly), Butterflies, M&M flowers, ants invading the picnic, and teddy grahams having a picnic!

The recipe used for the cupcake was the Hershey’s one earlier mentioned! It’s VERY important that when you use this recipe that you FOLLOW the 2/3 filling in the cupcake liners. Otherwise, they overflow (some did for me). But they made the apartment smell yummy!

I began the frosting same way with the Easter cupcakes-white and green, creating the two-toned grass. This time the frosting wasn’t whipped so it formed better. Unfortunately, I didn’t think ahead enough to set aside some for the flowers. I had to make some extra and the recipe I did wasn’t exactly “stiff” as I wanted it to (the sunflowers “melted”). I find it really challenging to estimate how much frosting you are going to use for the “base” of the cupcake and the decorations on top. I will do some further research on how to figure that one out.

After creating the grass, I began creating the M&M flowers and butterflies. I did this by placing the M&M’s how I wanted them in the appropriate shape. Then, I took some pretzel sticks and broke them in half and stuck them at the top of the butterflies to create antennas and used normal pretzels for the wings. For the flowers, I just decided on the colors and placed them in the basic hexagon shape. For the Ants invade, I used red and white airheads, cut them into squares and did the checkered design. Then, I placed broken pretzel sticks down and M&M’s over them and volia! Invading ants! For the Teddy Grahams, I just placed the teddys in a circle, added runt “fruit” candy and mixed in colored Nerd candy to create a “feast” for them! (They seemed to enjoy it!)

Now for the “sunflowers”, I just placed mini-oreos on the grass and used the M cut on the bag (should have done the V cut because they are petals/leaves) and placed the yellow frosting in there (homemade frosting and Golden Yellow Wilton “goo”) and tried to create the sunflowers. I would have worked better if the petals didn’t start melting from setting out in room temp (I created more of Icing than frosting). 

Overall, these were definitely fun and successful for me minus the sunflowers. I need to create a better recipe for frosting and learn to better estimate how much to use for the base and decoration.