Woodland Cupcakes ~ Part 2!

Happy Sunday!  I hope you're all enjoying this beautiful day as much as I am!  We've had some wonderful weather in Nashville the last few days....so I'm sitting outside enjoying a delicious homemade lunch of arugula salad with crispy artichoke hearts, hard boiled eggs, and toasted pine nuts, drizzled with a lemon vinegrette....oh and french press coffee...oh so tasty!  

The week's blog features part two of the woodland cupcakes from last week.  The second style they wanted was a bird's nest with pastel blue eggs.

I looked at several websites to find candy eggs, but I wasn't happy with any of them, so I decided to make them myself!

I started with fondant that I colored robin's egg blue, then hand-rolled about 50 tiny eggs.  It took a little bit of practice to get them to look like eggs and not albino blueberries.  The shape isn't as easy as it looks!

Once the eggs had dried overnight, I used a paintbrush dipped in brown food coloring to "splatter" paint the eggs so they looked speckled.  Of course, this speckled my table as well....thank goodness for mr. clean magic erasers!

I had seen several different ideas for making the nest....toasted coconut, piped icing, chow mein noodle haystacks, etc...but my favorite one used shaved chocolate...it looked rustic yet elegant at the same time - perfect for this baby shower.

Since I had to chop some chocolate for the cupcakes too, I decided to go ahead and chop all my chocolate:

It took about an hour, but now all 14 lbs are chopped and ready for any recipe....which has me thinking about what I can make with bittersweet chocolate...hmmm.....maybe that recipe for flourless chocolate cookies I saw on Pinterest...anyway, back to cupcakes!

I piped a swirl of buttercream on each cupcakes, topped them with chocolate shavings, and then nestled a few eggs on each one...

And another shot... 

Stay tuned for some exciting news over the next few weeks!

And follow me on Facebook for a chance to win free cupcakes!  Once I hit 100 followers on Facebook, I'll randomly pick one lucky follower to receive 1 dozen cupcakes.  You can pick the flavor too...caramel macchiato, margartita, strawberry lemonade, or you can be creative and come up with your own specialty!

Happy baking....and eating!