Angry Birds Cupcakes

So another piano student (I only have 3) had a birthday last week - remember my other piano birthday post? Anyway, A just turned seven - fun age!! Active boys are quite the challenge at the piano bench and I'm looking more and more into activities we can do to keep him engaged.

(I've just found this teaching resource and I'm super excited to try it out. I'll let you know how it goes!)

And he loves Angry Birds. I found a blank notebook with the red angry bird on the front on clearance awhile back and I actually planned to use it for incentive - but then I thought, "Why not an Angry Birds birthday!" So I did.

I found this tutorial for fun cupcakes...

Aren't they awesome!?

source

So, last Monday I went to gather my supplies. Marshmellows, frosting, black licorice, red sprinkles...

I really didn't think that it would be super difficult. Well, four stores later, I realized that I had no idea where (and no time left!) to look for red sprinkles and none of the stores carried rope licorice so I had to give up on sprinkles and I used a chopped chocolate bar for the angry eyebrows.

All of that to say, I was sorely disappointed in my rendition. Not to mention, the frosting was PINK! I tried so hard to make it red (the tutorial even said to use red gel coloring to get it red, but my gels just didn't work!) - and pink is SO not cool for a 7 year old boy, mind you. Sigh.

They ended up looking messy and childish but I wasn't about to throw away something I'd put money and time and thought into. So I shared them - at least they were tasty!

mmm! :-)

a Tootsie Roll birthday card

(*aaaaaand .... we're back!)

One of my piano students birthdays was last week (the same day as my mom's actually - happy birthday, Mom!) and I had sudden inspiration the day of to make her a fun card.

She said her favorite candy was tootsie rolls (or pops) so I made her a "bouquet" of tootsie pops and broke out the mad decoupaging skills and made her a Tootsie Roll card during naptime.

Super easy. I took brown, red and white cardstock and cut a brown rectangle, two red strips and then two rounded "candy ties". I made one tie and then inverted it and cut out the other so it would match. (If you look close you can see that the brown/red part is a little bigger than the white - it was already glued down, otherwise I would've trimmed it up. Oh well, perfection is not the goal.)

Then I googled the font on Tootsie Rolls and came up with Cooper Black. Thankfully, we had it in Word and I typed out a few different sizes of her name and printed it out. Size 60 was just perfect, so I painstakingly cut out the little letters (I left them connected in little spots so it would be easier to attach) and then decoupaged her name on so it would all be shiny like a real candy.

I am (slightly embarrassingly) still super excited about this card. Love it!