Cupcake creations

The day I was trying in vain to make the layers of Joanna's birthday cake, Ben had a friend over to play. Due to the abundance of cupcakes from my multiple cake making attempts, I served these for morning tea. I made up some quick icing and layed out a few decorating items (coloured sanding sugar, dinosaur sprinkles, fairy sprinkles and skittles) and let the kids decorate their own before eating it. The common theme for decoration ended up being faces, but no two faces were the same!

(Now some kids may think this activity cool enough to wish they were a permanent part of our family, but no, while eating his decorated cupcake, Ben's friend declared that he wished he lived at our house

because we had All Blacks football cards in our Wheat Bix box! - I was unpacking the grocery shopping at the time)

Update - I said I'd let you know how cake #3 went...well I am happy with the height of it and I think I'm happy with the colour (although it is a little hard to tell because as I used the whole 1/2 quantity of cake batter for it, I didn't have any spare cupcakes to cut into and check the colour like I did with the first two attempts). I also worked out more specifically why I needed to use more pink colouring than the recipe and why the first attempt at pink just looked dirty. I can blame it on our free range chook eggs with their deep yellow yolks! Because using these means that even the plain coloured cake is quite yellow looking instead of the paler usual colour of plain cake. One situation where the cheap, mass produced, battery hen, sickly pale yolk eggs would actually be desired! (although I'm going to stick with our home grown, free range eggs - which we are getting 2-3 per day at the moment)