I’m often encouraging kids to work large with drawing and painting, but sometimes small is wonderful, too. Especially when the small involves the top of a cupcake!
I asked Maia what she wanted to do yesterday and when she said, “Make cupcakes!” I made the big mistake of sitting down with her on my lap in front of Martha Stewart’s site to look at all her cupcake recipes.
What was I thinking?! Maia, of course, wanted to make every fantastic cupcake on there, from the monster cupcake to the monkey cupcake to the ladybug cupcake. I wasn’t about to painstakingly fashion each individual blade of grass from frosting and talked her into this simple glazed lemon cupcake instead since we had all the ingredients on hand.
MY LATEST VIDEOSDecorating Cupcakes with Kids :: Painting with Food Coloring
Since decorating the cupcakes is half the fun I got out our food coloring to paint the blank cupcake canvases.
We applied the coloring like paints, using q-tips for our brushes. We used Wilton gel food colors but I imagine regular food coloring would work as well.
Knowing how much I value art, I imagine Maia may start lobbying for cupcakes more often now that we’ve used them as canvases!
Decorating Cupcakes with Kids :: Edible Flowers
For the flower-decorated cupcakes, we put pansies on some of them (I double checked to make sure they were on this edible flower list) .
If you’re thinking about decorating cupcakes or cakes with edible flowers, check out the list. There are SO MANY flowers that are edible! Way more than I had thought.
Oh, and the cupcakes themselves were easy, delicious and very lemony!
Definitely a hit.
Thank you for all these wonderful ideas!
Fun project!!
Those are actually pansies, not violets. But pansies are still edible, as long as they’re not treated with pesticides:
http://www.marthastewart.com/good-things/edible-pansies
Ha! That’s what I meant. Thanks. I’ll change it.
My kiddies love decorating their cupcakes too, they have some fab food colouring pens that they enjoy using but I like your idea for adding food colouring :-)
Wow — never thought of “painting” with food coloring and q-tips like that before! We love cupcakes and will have to try this soon!! Thanks for the inspiration!
oh what a brilliant idea! so sweet too. I came here via shutter sisters, glad I did, I feel inspired to decorate some cupcakes with my little ones!!
Lovely. As usual.
These look amazing. I’ll have to try this one.
These are awesome – you (and Maia have inspired once again.)
Food coloring pens? You have me intrigued!
Those are astonishing cupcakes! Really cute! I wish I could do something special like that.
These are beautiful !! I have let my daughter paint on glazed cookies in a similar way here
http://puttiprapancha.blogspot.com/2010/12/painted-cookies.html
Guess cupcakes will be our next stop:) Thanks for inspiring..
Food coloring pens are expensive (atleast for me) but definetly fun! You can write on almost anything edible marshmallows, breads, cookies, cakes… Kids love them bcos its just like drawing with markers:)