Some people bake a ham...

Saturday before Easter, Sister and I got together in my kitchen and made holiday-themed cupcakes.  Admittedly, it was a bit late in the day to take on lambs and chicks, but I've seen her whip up a batch of fried pie dough in less than ten minutes so I am fully aware of what she's capable of creating when pushed for time.

THIS is what the lamb cupcakes look like if you start early and have all the right decorating ingredients...  Cute, huh?

This is what lamb cupcakes look like if you don't!!  I think if we'd maybe been drinking they would have been so much cuter.

You can bet I'll put wine on the shopping list next time.  And, now that we know what NOT to do, next year will be soooo much easier, right?  (Here I am assuming that we won't find anything even more creative to do by then.  What a sorry lack of faith!!)

I'll admit, the whole idea was mine.  And I'll even go so far as to say that, usually, the things that we end up doing that seem scatterbrained and far-fetched and ridiculous considering the resources we have are most often things I've suggested.  In my own defense, I always have pictures of what the end product needs to look like!!  In this case, I had actually even made the chick cupcakes all by myself a few Easters ago.  So I brought experience to the party.

I am a firm believer in taking the easy route whenever possible, so I had two boxes of ready-made cake mix and several tubs of ready-made frosting.  I suspect that my pictures came with recipes for a reason, at least where the frosting was concerned, as ours ended up a bit too soft for the project.

Live and learn.

We doubled the cake recipe so things would go faster and poured the entire batter into a large zip lock.  Snip one corner of the bag and the cups will fill quickly and with little mess!  The first shortage came when we filled the tins; I only had two and we really needed at least four.  Again, live and learn!!  Another shortcut that really helped was putting all the decorations out in small bowls to make them easy to see and to reach.  We separated by color and type.

I shopped several places in town looking for ready-made candy eyes for our sheep but nobody seems to stock them.  Michael's online shows them in the stores, but they are not.  Wal-Mart in Addison has a huge Wilton section, but no eyes!!  I could have spent the rest of the day looking for a "specialty" store that might have them, but I had other things to do, so we improvised and made them from mini-marshmallows and licorice bits.  Way too much cutting and snipping and placing and sticking to our fingers!!!  If ever we attempt lamb cupcakes again (or any other animal that requires eyes) I'll purchase them online well ahead of baking day.   Meanwhile,  the chick cupcakes require toasted coconut, so we took advantage of the warm oven to get that part done ahead as well.

Finally, we sat down to frost and assemble.  And quickly realized that, (1) it was way too late to be frosting and decorating cupcakes that required 35 mini-marshmallows, and (2), we were way too tired to really care all that much what something that was likely going to be eaten anyway looked like!!

Thankfully, the chicks ended up going really fast and looking really cute.

***SIGH***