Cupcake Bouquet

As I have time, I'll go back and add posts about previous projects.  However, I'm going to start with my most recent projects and work backwards until I'm caught up.  And then you can have fun looking at how awful my first projects were in comparison!  :)

First off, I'm not a professional food-preparer.  I started doing this because I had a lot of friends getting married/having babies and was a part of throwing a lot of showers.  Of course, we live in a world of Facebook and Pinterest, so there's a lot of pressure to make everything beautiful.  But having meals catered and purchasing cakes/cupcakes gets expensive.  So that's one of the reasons I started teaching myself how to decorate cakes.

This past weekend, I was part of throwing a baby shower for a friend, and was asked to make some lemon cupcakes with raspberry frosting (one of my faves)!  I'd seen photos of a cupcake bouquets, and I suggested that we try to make one for this shower.  What happened majorly exceeded my expectations!

I started off by generally following the guidelines from the Midwest Living blog.  I purchased a small metal pail at the local craft store, and a friend decorated it with the flowers and ribbon (so cute!).  We used a 7" styrofoam ball and ended up being able to fit about 34-36 cupcakes on that ball.  A couple of tips that I'll mention that weren't covered in the original instructions we followed:

1. Keep the plastic covering on the styrofoam ball.  If you remove it, the styrofoam starts flaking off and that will get all over your cupcakes.
2. We added some decorative rocks to the bottom of the pail to give it some weight.  I was worried it was going to topple over otherwise. 
3. I largely delegated the task of assembling the bouquet to another friend that is very crafty.  She constructed the supportive pieces, placed the cupcakes on the styrofoam ball, and filled in the gaps with the green tissue paper leaves.  She did not actually read the instructions off the blog - I was instructing her on each step.  So when she secured the cupcakes onto the styrofoam ball, she actually held the unfrosted cupcake against the ball and then pushed the toothpicks through the top of the cupcake.  The reason this is important is because the cupcakes ended up being much more secure that way than when I did the trial the way it is shown in the original blog.
4. I made homemade cupcakes and buttercream frosting.  If you're making your own, just make sure that you don't add too much liquid to the frosting - you want to make sure the frosting will not slide off or lose it's shape once you pipe it onto the cupcakes.  
5. If possible, refrigerate the bouquet after it's assembled.  We did not have space in the fridge to do this, but as the frosting warmed up (and it was sitting in front of a window with the sun streaming in), the frosting did slide off two of the lower cupcakes.  Thankfully, they were in the back of the bouquet and it didn't slide off until after everyone had gotten a good look at it! 

Here's our final product!  How'd we do?  I was pretty excited about how it turned out!  

Click here for the lemon cupcake recipe I used.  

And here is the raspberry buttercream recipe I used, only I used seedless raspberry jam instead of fresh raspberries and added a little pink food coloring to get the color I wanted.

Since I knew we were going to be putting toothpicks through these, I skipped the raspberry filling.