What a week it has been! I am so blessed to have been able to celebrate two very important little boys in my life! This weekend, Mr. Evan and I made the trip down to Augusta for my ADORABLE nephews' joint birthday party! First of all, I have to say, my sister is AMAZING! She threw together a really beautiful, classy, FUN circus-themed party for my nephews. She thought of everything! There was so much amazing stuff that I can't even begin to describe it all! Hopefully I can add some pictures later to show you all exactly how amazingly talented she is as an event coordinator.
Until then, I guess I can talk about how awesome I am. Ha...just kidding. But I do want to share the fun cupcakes I made for the boys.
When you think of the circus, the first things that come to mind are clowns, elephants, lions and popcorn. Or at least that's how it is for me. So I decided to start there. Brooke had also wanted to have a "big top" cupcake on the very top of the stand, so that's where I'll begin to explain.
Obviously I made the cupcakes (Kroger brand cake mix- I got cheap and lazy with this) and iced them (Kroger brand vanilla icing) and got started on the fondant.
Have you ever bought fondant? It's expensive. And it tastes like crap. So I wanted to know if there was some way I could make my own and make it tasty. I found the best recipe on Wilton.com for marshmallow fondant. This stuff is so freaking easy! And YUMMY!
What you need:
- 16 oz mini marshmallows
- 2 lbs of confectioner's sugar (powdered sugar)
- water
- a microwave-safe bowl
- a microwave
- crisco
- food coloring
Pour those marshmallows into the bowl and put about 2 tbsp of water in there. Nuke 'em! 30 second intervals and stir in between until it's all creamy. Next you're going to want to dump about 3/4 of the bag of sugar into the mix and stir in a bit. When it's got a good enough consistency that you can pull it out, grease down your counter-top and your hands and pull that lump of lovely sugary goodness out and knead it til you think your arms are going to fall off, adding powdered sugar in there to make it a little firmer.
Once you have it fondant-y feeling, you can separate it into balls for each color you need and get to work coloring it. Knead it to death while mixing those colors in. I needed yellow, red, orange, green, blue, grey and white. Guess which one was easiest to make? :)
I had a whole bunch of cookie cutters that I got from Ikea and let me tell you, they saved my life this week! To make the big top, I cut a circle out of both red and yellow then used my mini pizza cutter to make the triangles. Then I put them on top of a third red circle with yellow and red alternating. Note: put a little water on the bottom red one before placing the colored triangles on top and then put a little cornstarch on top and roll out a little bit. You want to mesh them together by doing this. Before you put this on top of the cupcake, make a little icing pyramid and stick it in the freezer for a few to firm it up. Place the "big top" on the cupcake and then make a tiny orange ball for the very very top.
For the lion, you need to roll the orange fondant pretty thick and cut out as many circles as you want (I did 8). I used an exacto knife to cut tiny triangles out of the edge to make the lion's mane. Then you need to roll it out a little bit so it overflows the cupcake liner. Then cut a yellow circle out for his head and tiny half circles for his ears. Roll a little orange ball for his nose.
Elephants! I just free-handed this one. You can figure this one out...
Clowns. This was a hard one for me since I HATE clowns. Terrified of them, really. But anyway, I used a heart cupcake for his hair and free-handed the rest. I had some little eye sprinkles handy that I used for the eyes. Easy-peazy.
For the popcorn, I had to mix some white and yellow together but not mix them up very well. Then I just free-handed some shapes and scrunched them up and attached them to a colored background. Then I cut some white stripes (really thin) and placed them on red fondant and rolled it out. Then I cut some popcorn buckets and attached them on top of the "popcorn" to make these cute little things.
For the stars, polka dots and stripes, I cut out the tiny shapes and placed them on colored bagrounds, rolled them out and cut circles out.
Got it? Good. Now make 100 of those little suckers and You're done! :)
