Scrumptious Cupcake Liners

Munchkin and I decided to make some cupcakes today.

I've been wanting to try out this template for a few weeks, and since Superhubs was working tonight, we took the opportunity. The secondary motive for making them was to have a test run for Munchkin's 2nd birthday party that's coming up in a couple of weeks. Ya - I test run my cupcake liners. I am that much of a control freak. I simply printed the template out on white paper, then traced it onto a particularly heinous-colored scrap of cardstock that I will never want to use for scrapbooking purposes. Kind of an avocado-lime color with just the slightest hint of vomit. Ew.

Betty (the Crocker, not the Slice) helped us out - I am so not one of those people who are dedicated enough to make cakes from scratch. They're still scrumptious out of the box, so why mess with a good thing, right? Plus it sends a dime my school's way, which totally justifies the $2.00 I spent on it in the first place.

Munchkin loves to help me cook stuff - every time I'm in the kitchen for longer than 1.5 minutes he scampers in shouting "help mama!" and dragging a kitchen chair behind him, whether I'm actually cooking or not.
Behold the first pictures of Munchkin on this blog - he was really helpful with the whole cake mixing thing. :)

looks like even Spiderman got a taste.

While our cupcakes cooked, we entertained ourselves by taking a couple of candids -

and then I started making our liners while he indulged in some Toy Story 2. I just traced my little template onto the patterned paper, cut it out like so

then curled it around on itself and taped the edges together. Voila.



However, after making a few out of the originally designated boy-patterned paper below, I realized that the single-sided print just wasn't gonna cut it - these babies need double-sided paper to get the full effect.

Not having any boy-patterned double-sided paper on hand (despite owning a stack of paper about a foot high - how does that work?), I decided to pull out some of my favorite patterned scraps and put them to good use - love it when I find good projects for scraps!
Aren't they lovely?

I made the mistake of frosting my first batch before placing them in the cupcake liners, which resulted in frosting muckage, on my fingers and the liners. So if you make these, frost after putting your cupcakes in (duh, Mary!)

Munchkin volunteered to sample some cupcake, to make sure they were still yummy post-oven. They were.

Finally, I popped them onto my $1 garage sale find cupcake displayer (what's the correct term for this gadget?) and admired.

Aaah - culinary art at its finest, I'm sure.

In the morning we'll take them over to Munchkin's church nursery leaders with a thank you card. They are amazing and really do the hardest job at church so we mamas can get our worshipping in every week, God bless 'em!

And let's face it - I don't need to eat 13 cupcakes on my own. :)

-mary-