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.

Decorating 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.