Endangered Cupcakes & Book Review

Just as cute, and a thousand times sweeter than the real thing, I totally fell for these panda cupcakes! Originally from the Hello, Cupcake! book, these little pandas were a little time consuming to construct, but well worth the effort. While perusing the grocery store for all of the decorating ingredients, I had to get a little creative because they don’t carry chocolate covered sunflower seeds and Oreo’s Cereal. So, for the ears I used Mini Oreos taken apart and cut in half, and just used black icing for the nose. The cupcakes themselves were made from scratch (from the vanilla cupcake recipe in the book), but store-bought vanilla icing was used for icing in an effort to cut out an extra half hour from the prep time.

I made twelve total. The first six came out a little deformed before i got the hang of the squeezey tube black icing. Of course once they’re all put together you don’t want to actually EAT them. But, once I did manage to start munching on them I was pleased. The vanilla cupcake recipe isn’t the best I’ve ever had, but it’s fine (I probably baked them for too long), and not really the point of this creation anyway.

Sort-of Book Review Blurb:

If you haven’t seen the Hello, Cupcake! book yet (or bought it and made everything in it yet), then what are you waiting for!? It’s been written about on just about every baking blog already, and it’s FANTASTIC! I can’t wait to make the sunflower cupcakes and the garden party cupcakes, and OH! the owl cupcakes!!! It was given to me for Christmas and I pretty much can’t stop looking at it. I want to start throwing parties and whipping up these babies as gifts and maybe even just get some beautiful ideas of my own.

On top of all of the super cute cupcake designs, the full-page full-color images of all of the creations, and the tips & techniques for creating them, there’s a selection of homemade recipes at the back of the book for cake and icings. There’s also a section dedicated to altering out-of-the-box cake mixes! Yay shortcuts! Oh, and supplies sources! This book rocks!!!