More Practice with Real People!

Today I completed an order for my first repeat customer. She contacted me for another bridal shower and ordered 120 mini cupcakes... I was so excited! Repeat business AND a lot of cupcakes to play with. This lady is very laid back and only gave me her color scheme to go by: lavender, lilac, and lime. AWESOME colors, but I didn't know what to do about decorations. I looked up the color scheme online and most people who throw parties in that scheme use a lot of floral decor, so I decided on piped flowers.
Lilac was not an easy color to achieve.. it is bright and dark at the same time. I panic when I see a ton of food color going into my buttercream and I'm not getting the color I'm going for. This happened with my lilac color, which I added to my already naturally pink raspberry buttercream. I stopped adding color when I felt I was not getting a lot of bang for the amount of food color I put in; taste over appearance, I always say. And they looked cute enough not to worry to much.

My lime was also not very punchy.. which is what you need when using it with lilac and lavender. But again, I couldn't justify adding a half a bottle of food color so I kept it simple. It did pop nicely on the purples, though.

(the camera didn't capture the green very well above) I try to decorate each flavor in one consistent design. Two cupcake flavors were filled, so I couldn't get too fancy on them. With minis, I do not carve out the center of the cupcake to make room for filling- it just takes too much cake out of an already tiny cupcake. So I dam up some filling on top and then pipe over it. On those flavors, I had to keep the decor simple. But on the plain vanilla, I had a little fun with my lavender color and piped pretty flowers:

It's hard to maintain a color scheme that doesn't include brown when you have a chocolate frosting. But I did my best to make it work.

And I'm SO EXCITED to finally have packaging and labels! It's neat to pretend I am official and use professional packaging and cute labels. Initially I was worried about these because it seemed hard to get the cupcakes out once they were in. I was actually almost in a complete panic about it, but then Brad came home from work. I explained my distress and he immediately turned into a salesman and explained how neat the package is because if you push the bottom up, the cupcake pops up for easy access. I almost cried with relief. He is such a good man! Especially during a freak out!! <3

So, there you have it. 120 cupcakes. It doesn't look like it though, right? Amazing how they all fit into those neat little packages!

Happy Easter!!