The One with the Duck Cupcakes

I wanted to make a cute dessert for Brycen's blessing on Sunday.

Last week I borrowed my sister-in-law Erika's books with super cute cupcake ideas.

After looking through both I decided to go with

ducks.

So on Saturday afternoon, Amber and Erika came over and helped me decorate the cupcakes. I had baked them the day before so they were all ready to go.

It took us almost three hours to decorate these little guys. They weren't difficult at all, just had a lot of different steps. But it was a lot of fun!

Amber and Erika, I couldn't have done these without you! Thanks again for your help!

We started off by frosting all of the cupcakes {24} with white frosting.

Then we put a donut hole on one side of the cupcake for the head and half a marshmallow on the other side for the tail {the marshmallows are cut diagonally}.

And PS, in 8th grade I misspelled the word "diagonal" in the school spelling bee and now will never forget how to spell it. That was such crap, I totally knew that word.

...

After the donut hole and marshmallow were on we frosted up the sides of each so they would stick to the cupcake. Then we put them in the freezer for about 30 minutes.

In the mean time I colored more of the frosting yellow for the outer coating of the ducks. We used almost three containers of frosting for these cupcakes, but not quite.

And Amber and Erika made beaks and feet with orange tootsie rolls.

{I bought about 20 from the tootsie roll bin at WinCo. We did 16 cupcakes as sitting ducks and 8 cupcakes as ducks with their tails and feet up in the air like they were going down into the water. We only needed half a tootise roll to make one foot. We got two beaks out of half a tootsie roll as well.}


When the cupcakes were firm in the freezer, I took them out one at a time and dipped them in the yellow frosting {melted in the microwave about 45 seconds, after stopping and stirring it a couple of times.} The key is to take them out ONE AT A TIME or they will thaw, and their heads and tails will fall right off. Sounds very morbid - wouldn't want that to happen.

Dipping them made a nice gloss finish for the cupcakes. Much easier than trying to frost them all! When dipping, it's important to go right down to the paper. I used foil liners that had a paper liner inside. So I baked the cupcakes with both on then we took the foil ones off to decorate the cupcakes. When they were finished we put them back in the foil ones so they looked nicer.

{Another option is to color coconut and pat the coconut onto the cupcakes after they're frosted. That looks cute too!}

And Brycen sat on the floor next to the kitchen watching us. :)

Here's the finished product! He wasn't the cutest one we did, but you get the idea of what they look like ha ha. We piped white dots for the eyes then placed mini chocolate chips flat side up over the white.

The ones with the bums in the air were so cute!

The cupcakes turned out so cute and were a big hit!