They may look cute, but do they taste good?

Jocelyn's first birthday has slowly been creeping up.  I've known I wanted to make cow cupcakes for her to bring to day care since she was born in the Year of the Ox, but didn't know how or what I was going to use for inspiration until earlier this week.  How's that for last-minute planning?  Ai-yi Melissa helped out by pointing me to this photo on Flickr:

Perfect, I thought.  Looks easy enough!  After exchanging a few emails to Cake Decorator Extraordinaire, I knew what I had to do and what I had to buy.

Or so I thought.

I bought everything I needed to make the fondant.  Except for black food coloring.  Oops.  (Thank goodness for friends at work who also dabble in cake decorating. :-)  Made the fondant Wednesday night.  Note to self: Next time, just buy the black fondant at the craft store.  Stayed up until the wee hours trying to shape the snout, ears, horns and eyes.

Thursday night's checklist: bake cupcakes, ice cupcakes, stick on horns/eyes/snouts.  Totally thought I had vanilla or yellow cake mix.  Couldn't find it, so I used Funfetti.  (Kids like that stuff, right?  So not too terrible of a substitution.)  Totally thought I had white icing... didn't.  Couldn't whip up my own batch of icing because all I had was fake butter, which would have made it way too yellow and it has salt.  Yuck.  Didn't want to use Crisco because the idea of one-year olds (and two and three and four-year olds) chowing down Crisco grosses me out.  Had a bunch of bricks of cream cheese so I thought, why not make cream cheese frosting?  Plus, it's "healthier" than a tub of white frosting!  Nice surprise: the cream cheese frosting turned out more white than I expected.

Then I gave a cream-cheese frosted Funfetti cupcake to my Quality Control Tester.  He said it was good, but wasn't sure the little kids would like the cream cheese frosting.  So I added even more powdered sugar to the frosting.  It tasted a little better.  Frosted all the cupcakes.  Then, finally, at around 1:00 am I started to put the components on the cupcakes.  I was worried that I had made the parts too big since I didn't have an *actual* cupcake on Wednesday night to make sure everything was proportional.  But voila!  The cows didn't turn out so bad, did they??



   
So now the last thing to find out is whether or not they are a hit with the kids at day care.  When I made piggy cupcakes for Kayla's 1st birthday the kids were all excited when the cupcakes were brought out.


The kids took their first bites and... FAIL.  Utter disappointment.  I had made strawberry frosting.  Apparently not yummy to those in the one to four-year old age group.  Will tomorrow (or today) be a repeat of Kayla's piggy cupcakes?  My only hope is that the other kids like cream cheese as much as Kayla does (who licks the cream cheese off of her toasted bagels and leaves the bagels uneaten).