Making Cupcakes Cute

I saw the suggestion in a Martha Stewart cupcake book to cut out pictures, stick them on toothpicks and use them as cupcake toppers.  I’m very lucky because I have a Cricut so I can custom cut shapes to top my cupcakes with, but you could just as easily cut out pictures from wrapping paper or print out clip art to use instead.  These were for the dinosaur party I hosted recently.

Also at Christmas I couldn’t find any Christmas sprinkles that tasted good enough to serve on cupcakes for adults so I cut out ‘Merry Christmas’ and some Christmas trees and used those as toppers and they looked just a bit different from your regular cupcakes.

Crispy Treat Nests

I try really hard to make our favorite baking ideas applicable all year round, and Easter nests are one of my favorite things.  I hosted a dinosaur party a couple of weeks ago and was trying to think of a dinosaur themed crispy treat.  I was also in my Easter mode and so nests were on my mind and then I thought why not make ‘pterodactyl nests’.  I made fruity pebble crispy treats as they seem to be all children’s favorites.

But instead of putting them in rectangular cake pan and cutting them out with cookie cutters, I piled a spoonful of the crispy treats into muffin cases. 


Once they were cool I used a spoon to flatten out the center to make a nest shape.  If you try to do that when the crispies are hot, they will just stick to the spoon.  I could have left the nest just like that and filled them with eggs and chicks for Easter, but because it was for a party I needed the nests to be very durable so I could get them to the party and then the children could get them home as favors, without them falling apart.  I melted some white candy melts and used a basting brush to put a layer on top of the nests.

Once it was dry, I turned the nests over and coated the bottom to make them really strong and taste extra sweet.


I piped a ring of icing around the nest and covered in with flower sprinkles to make a pretty dinosaur nest and then I added some big flowers made from mini M&Ms glued onto a mini nilla wafer with icing.

At the party the boys put more jelly beans around their nests to look as if they were built from rocks and they made ‘man eating’ flowers.  We also topped the nests with pterodactyl cookies.  So you can now make Easter nests year round and make them dinosaur, lizard, snake or birds nests. 

Edible Dinosaur Fossils

I’ve seen so many recipes on Pinterest for clay to make dinosaur fossils out of, but none of them are edible.  I was hosting a dinosaur birthday party last week so I was on a mission to make an dinosaur fossil that tasted good.
I bought some little dinosaurs and these three were the best shapes to use as they were simple and easily recognizable.

My first try was with Starburst.



It seemed like it should have worked but you could hardly see the outline of the dinosaur.

I even tried putting oreo crumbs in the shape to outline it, but that just made it look worse.

They tasted great, but didn’t really work as fossils.  Next I tried white chocolate (I didn’t have milk chocolate, which would have looked more like rock).

They looked great but I couldn’t get the dinosaur out of chocolate without cracking it.

Again they tasted good but they didn’t look good.

My last attempt was using one of my favorite recipes – oreo truffles.  The photos are blurry and because the truffles are so dark the fossils don’t show up to well, but they worked perfectly.

I flatten a ball of the truffle mix and then pressed a dinosaur into the truffle.

Then I put them into the fridge for about 30 minutes to harden.  If your kids are desperate to eat them you could put them in the freezer for about 10 minutes or just let the kids eat them as they are.  I let mine harden as I needed them for the party and wanted them to be firm.

They looked much better when you make them rather than in the photo.  I turned them upside down in a bowl of oreo crumbs and had the kids at the party pretend they were excavating, which they loved.


My children just had great fun making footprints and molds of dinosaurs and candy.  I’ll definitely make truffle fossils again.