Baking Fun - Easter Bunny Cuppy Cakes

I had to contain myself yesterday not to post these on Facebook in case Maggie saw them before she left Winnipeg... here's hoping she's already on the road. :)

Easter Bunny Cuppy Cakes

For the actual cupcakes, I used a pre-made plain vanilla cupcake mix and just tossed in a bit of extra vanilla flavor in them. I like to use a more subtle cake flavor when the entire focus is on the icing as to not over do it - this worked very well. Also, instead of using food coloring, I added chocolate to the icing to make the brown ones so they have a slightly different taste than the green ones.

I took the design and idea from this book. Hello Cupcake is just wonderful because it makes things easy, uses real words and doesn't tell you you have to buy this and that and the other thing in order to accomplish this.

For the Rabbit Butts, I used chocolate icing and covered that in Oreo crumbs. I spent hours and hours looking for circus peanuts in this blessed town to no avail - so I settled to cutting the ends off marshmallows to make the feet. I used a black jelly bean, as shown in the book, for the large foot-pad but I recommend using either a chocolate covered peanut or raisin. The taste of the licorice jelly bean does not go very well with the rest so people will just pick them off. I couldn't find any chocolate covered sunflower seeds so I used some extra chocolate icing for the toes. I stuck everything on with a bit more icing - be careful when you add the Oreo crumbs to leave a bit of space for the sticking of the parts. Icing does not stick well to crummy surfaces - the feet will just fall off. Overall, very satisfied with how they turned out.

For the Green Grass ones, I simply piped some little stars to create the grass and stuck some mini-eggs, small candy flowers and some colorful sprinkles to give it a bit of color and make it look all Eastery and nice.

I used in total about 2 and a half cups of butter cream icing for the whole thing. Colored a bit more than half - so about 1 cup and a half - in green using paste coloring. That made about 30 cupcakes. I also put different amounts of batter in some of the cups as to give it a bit of variety and depth and it worked out wonderfully.

Can't wait to eat them!! :) Happy Easter baking!