Baby Shower Cupcakes

I actually made these a few months ago, for my baby shower in August.... but I felt they deserved a mention.

I found the inspiration for these cupcakes from a photo on Flickr. I used a basic vanilla buttercake recipe (from The Crabapple Cupcake Bakery Cookbook - an old favourite) to make the cakes, and a plain vanilla buttercream for the frosting. I portioned up the frosting, coloured some a peachy colour for the faces, some a rosy colour for the cheeks, and some black for the detail. The dummies were very hard to find. I must have gone to every party store, craft store, and $2 shop within an hours drive to find them, but eventually located them in Blacktown.


I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to work with black food colouring. The nasty lady at the cake decorating store told me not to add too much because it would affect the flavour. She said to use just a little and "leave it for a bit"... I still have no idea what she meant, because I did leave it for a bit, but still had to add another big glob of it, and a heap of cocoa, and I still couldn't get it to turn completely black, just a very dark brown. But it looked ok I guess.

Thoughts - I am generally not very good at cake decorating, mostly because after all the time spent baking I want to get on with eating them, so I tend to rush the frosting. But since Mr T was in town for the baby shower, and was looking over my shoulder, I couldn't really back out this time. On the whole I was really happy with them. A few looked a bit rough, so as a joke Mr T decorated one to look like the Elephant Man. But most of them looked really sweet, and I got a lot of compliments.