Whatcha up to, Cupcake?

Cupcakes and more cupcakes!  That's what I've been up to!  Whew... thank goodness it's over!  Although, now that my girls turned one it makes me miss all those itty bitty newborn moments...  sigh.

So you wanna see what I did for their birthday?  Feast your eyes on the PINK Cupcake themed birthday party!

Yes, everything you see on that table was made by moi!  I made the cupcakes, the vanilla-pink and chocolate covered pretzels, the strawberry-fudge cake-ball pops dipped in vanilla chocolate and covered with sprinkles!  And I even made the cute pails to hold the cake-ball pops!  (more on how I made the pails below!)

My Cupcake Birthday Cake.  Yes, I did make it!  With the help of hubby, of course ;)  Hubby made the chocolate liner... isn't it awesome looking??  ALL edible!

and the cuppy-cakes, of course:

Yes, I did design and print and punch out those adorable cupcake-toppers on the cupcakes!  You can download the cupcake toppers here.  Please remember they are for personal use only (not for resale or commercial use!  The cupcake image was found online for personal use.) And I used Friskars Squeeze-Punch -XL Seal of Approval.

...............and what's a party without SMASH cakes?  Or better yet!!!  Cupcake Smash Cakes!

kept their smash cakes simple!  just yellow cake and vanilla frosting.  first time they had sugar!  and boy are they not getting anymore sweets for a good loooong time!  they were SO crabby and on a total googley-eyed sweet-overload state for several hours!

It was OH so fun!!  Especially the cleaning up after lol

And the cute pails...  oh, how I love the pails!!  Lemme show you how I got them to hold the cake-ball pops in place.

First you'll need:

pails  (Target had these on sale!!)
tissue paper (color of your choice)
styrofoam
tulle
scissors

My styrofoam was huge so I grabbed a large shopping bag and set it at my feet and placed the styrofoam in and cut it up into rectangle pieces.  It's VERY messy when you cut, hence the shopping bag to catch the mess.

One I had the shapes I wanted cut up, I covered it with my tissue paper (pink in this case) and set it aside.

I cut up some tulle -about 22 inches long.  2 strips for each pail.   I set them on the table one strip over the other but in a cross.    North to South and West to East position, if that makes any sense.

Then I set my styrofoam covered in tissue paper right in the center, the ends of the tissue paper down.  Then pick it up, tulle and all and set it right in the pail like so:

and tuck the ends of the tulle gently inside as much or as little as you want so it looks like this:

and there you have it!  The pops will now stay in place when you stick'em in your cute pails.  :)

{click pic to enlarge!}