Oh the madness of bunny cupcakes....

I came across the most adorable bunny cupcakes on Pinterest a few months back & I just knew that I had to make them for Eloise's birthday party. I have never made a fancy cake or cupcake in my lifetime & really had little to no interest in figuring out how to do them.  That being said, I also had little to no interest in paying someone to make them for me. With those two options, I went with educating myself in cupcake artistry resulting in lots of added stress two days before the Bunny Bash. 

I talked with a friend from work who has designed & made incredible cakes/cupcakes. I showed her the picture online & she gave me the lowdown on how to make them.  Once we were talking about it, I actually was a little excited to get started. 

I am a perfectionist in some areas of life. I used to be that way about my house but after Eloise came along, I had to lower my standards along with my free time.  I had a vision of these cupcakes coming together so easily & being even better than the ones I saw online. HAHA!  I very quickly realized that these little bunnies would be far from perfect yet it took me a few more hours to be okay with it. The night before, I had stayed up late and made sugar cookie dough to chill overnight & be cut into the bunny ears in the morning. I made lots of it & rolled it into one giant ball & stuck it in the fridge. I was up at 6 the next morning trying to roll out this massive mound of hardened sugar cookie dough...I was in tears as I hurled it into the trash can.  I looked up a new recipe & got to work. Robby came into the kitchen around 6:30 and asked me what was wrong. I was a little ticked off & probably responded in a way that reflected my frustration.  He opened the trash can to find that the cookie dough was still in its baggie & not touching anything else so he pulled it back out. He started heating up portions of it in the microwave, rolling it out & cutting these perfect little bunny ears.  Within no time at all, the bunny ears were all cut & being baked in shifts thanks to my loving & patient husband. 

I called my friend Krinki who has taken some cake decorating classes & has made some wonderful cakes/cookies.  She was eager to give me some direction & then shocked me when she offered to come over for the afternoon to decorate them. She brought recipes for icing, all of her fancy tools, a fantastic attitude & even stopped at the store to pick up a few things we needed. Wow! I was blown away by her kindness & was SO thankful for her help. 

My mom was in town & got put in charge of mixing icing. We had baked the cupcakes the night before so they were just begging to be iced.  I picked out a cream cheese frosting to pipe on the top....it was pretty much amazingly delicious. We iced about 40 cupcakes in no time at all. It of course bothered me when I couldn't get each swirl to butt up against each other leaving those little openings but since we added a cookie on top, it was hidden.

While Krinki and I iced the cupcakes, my mom mixed up a batch of royal icing that was thick enough to pipe around the edges. I thought that was tedious.

Here is my sweet friend Krinki. This woman is a great mama to her 4 little ones that are 6 & under.  I think she was excited to sneak away to my house for the afternoon & do something out of the ordinary : )

Once the outside lines had hardened a bit, we used a thinner batch of royal icing to fill in the ears....

Here is my lovely mama, the hardworking icing maker refilling a bag for us. 

We mixed some pink into a smaller bowl of the thinner royal icing to fill in the inner ear. That was the easiest part of the decorating. I loved how shiny they looked.

Oh yeah, the birthday bunny awoke part way through the madness.  She was sitting in her high chair screaming at the top of her lungs as she pointed at the cupcakes.  I figured, what the heck, it's birthday week! I gave her another....she was pretty happy about that!

Once the ears were mostly hardened, we started placing them on top of the cupcakes. This is where my attitude started going down the drain.  I would put the ears on & they would lean backward in slow motion until they were flat on the cupcake. "Nice!" I thought as I remembered how perfect the ones in the picture looked.  We pulled out some lollipop sticks, cut them in half & jammed them down into the cupcake to hold up the ears. It worked for the most part. Rob came out of his office around this time to check on our progress. He could tell my frustration was pretty intense and as I was passionately exclaiming phrases like "I will NEVER make cupcakes again" & "this was the dumbest idea I have ever had, I should have paid a professional!"  bunny ears started falling off onto the table at random.

That was all it took for me to just start laughing.  It became more hilarious as the bunnies became more mangled looking.  We decided that the two pictured above looked like they may have been conjoined twins, sharing an ear. That night when we laid down, I was just smiling thinking about how good it is for me to not experience ease & perfection.  I was reminded of all the cakes that that my mom made for me over the years & that my favorite & most requested one was a 9x13 yellow cake, chocolate icing with M&Ms lined around the outside.  She would write in her handwriting "Happy Birthday Lauren" and I LOVED it. Eloise would have been content with a spoon covered in icing but I felt compelled to make the best bunny cupcake in the world. I mean it was the grand first birthday celebration right?

All that to say, I was pleased with the final outcome.

These were the good ones & if you do the math, there are 23 pictured out of 40 leaving 17 not so nice looking bunnies on the reject plate.  I should have taken a picture of that ; ) Rob said that if I would have been smart, I could have arranged them like they were in a bunny train crash.  Haha! Maybe next time ; ) Next time? What am I talking about? I said I would never do it again....