Cupcakes, Cupcakes and More Cupcakes....

If you have been following my blog for a couple of months, you may have read this post in April about how I've been doing a lot of cakes and cupcakes for our family parties.  This past weekend I had not 1 but 2 parties that I volunteered to bake for.  (I actually didn't realized they were the same weekend when I volunteered :) ).

It has been SUPER hot here in south-eastern Wisconsin so I took advantage of one cooler night earlier last week before the parties to bake all my cupcakes for both parties.  I then put them in my cake/cupcake carriers, covered them with a layer of plastic wrap and froze them until I needed to decorate them at the end of the week.  Since I made about 130 cupcakes for the two parties, this worked out really well.

The first party of the weekend was our nephew's 7th birthday party.  He is really into army stuff so of course he had to have camo cupcakes!  I took a quick look at Pinterest, (you can see my Cupcake PINspiration board here) and found a couple of camo cupcake inspirations.  For his cupcakes I made one box of white batter & one box of chocolate batter.  I split the white cake batter into two bowls and added some green food coloring to one bowl and a little bit of brown to the second.

My favorite food coloring for baking by Ateco

Then I did a layer of each color starting with the chocolate with the green on top and then baked them.

On the night before his party I took out the cupcakes, took them all out of the container and put them on cooling racks to prevent soggy bottomed cupcakes.  When they were thawed I stored them back in the containers.  The day of the party I mixed up some buttercream frosting (Wilton recipe) and colored it brown and green.  I put scoops of each color in my icing bag and went to town.

The final result:

The birthday boy and guests thought they were pretty cool.


The second party of the weekend was on Sunday and it was a surprise graduation party for my brother in law who just finished his apprenticeship to become an electrician.   After searching Pinterest and doing a Google search I didn't come up with much that didn't require fondant type stuff and I needed simple as I was planning for close to 100 cupcakes.

So I got creative and opted to decorate the cupcakes in the colors that the outside of wires are.. you know... the blue, green, yellow, red etc.  I went with blue green & yellow because red often looks pink unless you use a half gallon lot of red coloring.  I also figured I would make some of the graduation cap cupcakes that are so cute and easy too.

I did all of my decorating at the building we were having the party at... much easier to transport 100 cupcakes when you don't have to worry about frosting.  While I was setting up I came up with the idea to do rows of each color with the end cupcake being a copper colored one.  I don't the the copper color was perfect (but I was running out of time to worry about it too much).  I also used a black sharpie to draw some electrical symbols right on the table cloth.

So, they were definitely far from the best/cutest/neatest cupcakes, but they worked and my brother in law at least knew what I was going for :)!

I usually party at: Crafty Scrappy Happy

Bookmark Card

A few weeks ago I made this cute bookmark card for a birthday.  It's nice to send a card that has a little something special that can be useful, especially if you know any readers.  It would also be great paired with a good book for a gift.

 Since I made this before I started my blog I made another one with the same bookmark idea to post tonight.

Here are the supplies I started with although they are not exclusive because as I was creating I grabbed a few other things.  PS the cupcake stamps and the bird stamps in the first picture are Inkadinkado's Cling Stamps and they are so cute!  I also saw the cutest fish from the same line that might have to become part of my collection very soon!

So I stamped my bookmark, punched a hole and added brown ribbon. Then I decided to also trim the edges with my deckle scissors.  (I deckle almost everything :) )

Next I trimmed down my pretty paper to the right size.  

After playing around with positioning and also re-trimming a little I finally settled on this angle and glued it down with a glue roller.

I lined up my bookmark and ruler and then made a slit wide enough for the bookmark to slide through.  Make sure you have your card laid out flat so you don't slit the back page of the card and be careful when cutting.

I repeated the cutting step with the top, only I placed the bookmark in the bottom slot and then ended up sliding it down to just above where I wanted to cut the slit making it more likely that I'd line up the slits well!

On the inside I just made a little handwritten note to let the recipient know it was meant to come out and tucked the ribbon in.  Of course in the very first photo I used the ribbon as part of the card.  There are tons of different ways to customize this card from what you put on the bookmark to how you display it in the card.

Front of finished bookmark card.

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