March of the Penguins!

Ok, so here are the very first cupcakes I made from the Hello, Cupcake! book. They were my absolute favorite cupcakes when I looked through the book and my birthday was coming up so I decided I'd make them...for myself haha. I had help from my wonderful boyfriend, who cut up all the Starburst pieces into feet and beaks. He even made the lead Penguin a little birthday party hat, it was very cute and sweet of him:P So I found getting the icing around the timbit and donut hole to hold them together before dipping them in the heated up icing a little difficult, but it was also my first time doing anything like that. I slowly got the hang of it, but it's something I still need to practice! Once they were finished I started on the ice bucket and the icebergs, they obviously were very easy. When I finished I was pretty proud of the work we'd done and for the first go at it, they turned out alright!!

Lessons learned and tips for next time: 1) Use less icing between the cupcake and the donut and push then down as close to the cupcake as possible, that will make them look much better next time after dipping them. 2) If going to use mini chocolate chips for the eyes, do not put the flat part of the chip on the icing that is on the timbit. Stick the pointed part into the icing, that will make it much easier to put the dotted eye on the chip afterwards. Another thing would be to just use mini M&Ms like the book calls for, but I couldn't find any at the time so I found something else that worked. 3) Heating up the Starburst just a little bit, will make them easier to mold 4) the dipping part was easy, but I used a big glass measuring cup, so once it got closer to the bottom of the glass, it was very hard to dip and using a spoon to pouring it over them just made some weird lines, but again, that's something I need to practice. But next time I would maybe just add more icing.

 Catch of the day!!! The licorice under the penguins arm attached to the ice bucket!