Ladybug Toppers

My good friend, Paige, is expecting in early November, and her baby shower is this weekend. Of course, I jumped on the opportunity to make some sort of cupcakes for Paige's shower. She requested carrot cake (which is my favourite too). There may be an odd number of cupcakes arriving at her party... I don't know what could have happened to two of them!

At first I was having a bit of cupcake block. I don't know if that's a technical term, but I scoured my cupcake books and the internet, trying to come up with an idea of something to make for her blue and pink themed shower. I considered owls, bears, onesies, teddy bears and various other designs before I settled on blue and pink ladybugs! Although creating the ladybug toppers was a bit time consuming, the process was surprisingly simple.

Here's how they came together.

First, I needed candy melts. Three colours, black, pink and blue. I cut the pink and blue candy melts in half, and set them aside.

Then I drew out the design for the ladybug body on a piece of paper, and then I put some of the black candy melts into a ziploc bag. I microwaved them until they were melted and liquified. Next, I placed some wax paper over the paper template, clipped a corner off the ziploc bag, and piped the chocolate onto the wax paper to trace out the bug body.

Before the piped chocolate could cool, I stuck the halved candy melts into the chocolate to form the ladybug wings. As the chocolate solidified, the wings became attached. The main problem with this process is that the chocolate cools down every few minutes, so you have to put it back in the microwave repeatedly to get it back to piping temperature.

The most time consuming part was adding the ladybug dots onto the wings. This was again done with the black (chocolate) candy melts. Sometimes the chocolate would form stringers, and I would have to wait until the chocolate solidified before I could scrape off the little bits with a toothpick. Once the ladybugs were finished, I tucked them into a tupperware container, and stored them in the fridge for a couple of days (keep in mind, now that we have a baby, everything takes me about four days longer to accomplish than it used to!).

Today I made the cupcakes and frosting, and assembled all the cupcakes.

Voila!

I'm super pleased with how they turned out. Hopefully they will get gobbled up tomorrow!