Three Is NOT A Crowd: Cupcakes

For Lauren's first birthday I decided to make ladybug cupcakes. Red ladybugs with black spots.

I really thought this would be an easy task. Really I did.

Cupcake mix in a box. White icing + red food coloring. Piece of cake.

Wrong.

I baked all the cupcakes Saturday afternoon so they would be cool enough by evening to decorate.

That part went well since I can read and follow directions on the box.

About 8pm that night I decided to start decorating the cupcakes. I poured all the icing in a bowl and started adding drops of food coloring very slowly. The icing turned PINK. Added more and more drops and the icing turned HOT PINK.

I sat there for an hour freaking out on the verge of tears not knowing what to do. Finally I called a friend who has a friend that bakes a lot and she said that sometimes it takes the whole bottle of food coloring. So, I squeezed in the whole bottle.

Finally, the icing was some sort of shade of red and I could have lived with it, but the icing was sooo watery. It would just drip off the spoon.

I called that friend of a friend and it all turns out that I didn't get the right food coloring. Who knew there was actually a gel food coloring for icing? Not me. And since it wasn't even in the same aisle as the icing OR the food coloring, I never would have known.

Off to Wal-Mart I went at 10:30pm. Got the GEL food coloring and MORE icing.

After 2 jars of the new coloring, I had red-non-watery icing!

Iced the 4 dozen cupcakes (thank goodness my grandma was there to help!) and then started the decorating.

I drew the line & antennas with chocolate icing. (I originally wanted to use pretzel sticks dipped in chocolate for the antennas, but I was too tired at that point.)

Mini Oreo cookies for the head.

Mini M&Ms for the spots. (This took a huge bag of M&Ms to get enough brown ones!)

And woola!

Ladybug cupcakes!