Papa's Seagulls

My father-in-law is a seagull scientist so, in his honor, 

the kids and I made these on our last weekend at the cabin.

 Tying the little licorice lace around each set of three sticks was no easy task. 

Perhaps next time I will "glue" the sticks together with a little frosting before garnishing them with lace.

 Oh, but they do look cute, don't they?

 Because I got tired of making the piers, I thought it would be just fine to 

have some seagull floating on the water.  They do that, you know. 

 This sad little gull had a rough time.
First of all, the marshmallows are a pain in the neck

to cut out.  They're all gooey and sticky and smush when you try to cut them. 

I tried using a knife, a scissor, a round cookie cuter.  I ended up using the scissor.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if running my scissors through
a little flour would have helped them to not get so sticky.  Hmm. . .

 The "wing" on the side was supposed to be a little curled bit of frosting.  

But as you can see with this close-up guy, my frosting got a little smushy.  

The ziploc bag was getting tired.  

 Oh, yes, and of course, I weighed the batter again.  I'm really liking this system of perfection.

Perfectly baked.  Although the "blue" cake batter looks a little seafoam green.  

But that's accurate, right?

The kids loved them so they were a success.
Never making them again, though. . .

Picnic Ants - Take Two

 As stated above, this is the second attempt with the ants cupcakes.  

Ellie and I had a lot of fun the first time and I thought they were totally adorable 

so I just had to do them again for another crowd.

This time I used chocolate covered raisins instead of jelly beans 

because I thought the larger ant looked cooler.

 I really like these cupcake liners but they are not visible in the pictures of the 

cupcakes so I had to include this one instead.

 My batter is measured out perfectly using my kitchen scale.  

 I frosted them with light green, then rolled the edges in green sanding sugar.

Head, abdomen and thorax are pretty much all the same size.

 Aren't they cute with their little legs?  These turned out well.  

Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of an individual cupcake including the liner.

If only I could have found a little piece of watermelon candy to have an ant "carry".

I looked for it but couldn't find the right sized one.  Oh well, maybe next summer.

Picnic Ants - Take One

 These ants were my first attempt.  The idea book had the ants on light green frosting but I thought they would be cuter on green sprinkles.  I was wrong.  They didn't really stand out on the dark green.  Maybe if I had light green sprinkles instead of the dark green.

We used black, brown and red jelly beans.  

The red ones were cinnamon flavored since they were supposed to be fire ants.

 The chocolate frosting was also Trader Joe's premade mix. 

Because, of course, my summer is too crazy busy with too many trips and no time to bake real stuff.

 Ellie, my niece, did most of the decorating work on the cupcakes.  She is a natural!

 We lined up our ants so we could figure out how many we had.

 Some cupcakes were lucky enough to have two ants.  :)

 The ants legs were piped with black frosting from a little ziploc bag. 

Ellie did all the legs too!

Oh, two cute!!  Get it? "Two" instead of "too"?