Sunflower Cupcakes

I've never understood the fascination with cupcakes... I mean, they're cute, but I would never stand in line at 3:00 in the morning to buy a cupcake from some cute little brand new boutique. To me, they are pretty much just an avenue (and excuse) to eat a lot of frosting!

And then I started watching Cupcake Wars. I don't know if you're like me or not, but when I get new music or a new movie, that's pretty much all I watch or listen to for... umm, a sickening amount of time. Right now, I'm obsessed with Cupcake Wars! So, you can probably tell that's where this post is coming from! I watch a lot of CW and want so bad to make everything they're making!!!

I'd love to own one of those cute little boutiques that used to make me sick, I want to charge $4 a pop (you do realize it costs them like 80 cents to make the whole batch, right!?!?), and yes, I want to go on Cupcake Wars!!! And I'm not even competitive! I generally feel rotten if I win at a game with friends, because everyone else cares so much and I care so little about winning! But I think if I went on CW I could kick some butt =)

So, I started practicing! Haha! You can totally laugh at that statement, because even if I wanted to start my own cupcake bakery, the show wouldn't be on anymore by that time! But, anyway, here's what I did today - I had fun!

I made a really basic vanilla cupcake. I found the recipe on someone else's blog, and replaced the vanilla bean with dried orange peel and candied ginger.

You can see some orange specks on top in the photo at Left.

The sunflower idea came from an incredibly dorky (yet informative) youtube video I saw from some Canadian named YoYoMax12.

I made a chocolate buttercream, and piped little sunflower seeds......

Then, the petals... which drooped pretty badly! I need to work on consistency apparently!

On the video, she put two different colored frostings in the same piping bag... But my first cupcake was pretty much only yellow, and by the end the colors mixed so much that I just had pinkish-orange petals =(

At Right, you'll see flower #1 -- I was ambitious and made two layers of petals. Then I realized that I might run out of frosting pretty quickly, so I just did one layer on the rest of them =)

And at Bottom........ the finished products!!! The ones at far left were the first ones, then progressing to the right were the latter ones. The last ones were actually really droopy and pitiful! I'm most pleased with the middle cupcakes =)  But honestly, I felt like I did a FANTASTIC job for it being my second time EVER to decorate cupcakes!!!! And, with no one (besides YoYoMax12) to teach me =)