Cupcakes for a CARS themed birthday

My little one has a birthday coming up in a few weeks and we decided to go with a CARS theme. I've got a few tricks up my sleeve thanks to other creative souls in the Pinterest world, but I wanted to make the cupcakes for the party myself, rather than spending the $30/dozen it would cost to have them made for us. (trust me those cupcakes are worth the $30/dozen--we used that baker for our wedding and they were a HIT! but not an appropriate amount of money for our family to spend on a little tikes birthday party)

To stick with the "Lightning McQueen" color scheme, I decided to make red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, yellow sprinkles and… decorations. I researched some pre-made CARS cupcake toppers, but they too were expensive, and weren't a very good resemblance of the characters. Since we still have a large number of adults coming to the party, the plastic toppers (rings) aren't a great option for them anyway, and I hate spending all of that money only for it to be thrown away. So, here we go!

I did a run through today to make sure I could make them look good before the party actually comes around. I purchased boxed cake mix and pre made frosting, as well as some yellow sprinkles and come creme filled cookies.

I baked the cupcakes according to the box directions, although, I will say this: Has anyone else noticed that unless you are perfect at dispensing batter into the cupcake wrappers, you NEVER get exactly what the box says you will?? Yield for this box was 24, I got 20. I came close, but this also tells me, come the big day, I'll need more than one box if I'm going to have enough. While everything was baking away, I started on the decorations for the cupcakes. I cut cookies in half to resemble tires.

A few tips about cutting these cookies that I learned (maybe you already knew):

• use a serrated knife
• Don't "push" through the cookies, they will break. Every. Time. Instead, "saw" through the cookies slowly, to keep the cookie intact on both sides. It makes the cupcake look a little more professional this way.

The pile on the left is my done pile, the pile on the right is the snack pile--for eating, not decorating, before I learned to saw through them.

Then I went to work making racing flags using checkered duct tape and toothpicks. I have a cutting mat for other projects that I sterilized and used an exacto knife to cut pieces of duct tape and then strips from there (sorry, forgot to take photos as I did this). I put about a 1/2" of the toothpick on the duct tape, folded it over and then added the  flag edge by folding in half and making one cut to remove a triangle. I already had this duct tape, as I plan to use it for other party decorations.

Once the cupcakes cooled, I frosted using the Wilson 2A tip and a disposable bag that came in the kit I purchased. I love the way the pros frost cupcakes with this tip, so before I went shopping, I watched this video to show me the best way to tackle this type of frosting. Umm, isn't she adorable? I thought this video was cute. I'm fairly certain all of the tips she uses in her video are in the kit I bought, just for future reference. From there, I added yellow sprinkles, a half of a creme-filled cookie and two toothpick flags to each one.

I'm pretty pleased with the way they turned out, but I wish the sprinkles were a little more YELLOW. Against the cream cheese frosting, which isn't truly white, they don't stand out as much as I'd like. I'll likely try to hunt down some other sprinkles for the party, but this was all I had access to in my rural town. Besides that and a proper cupcake stand (or maybe a homemade version!), celebratory dessert is covered! Enjoy, and happy baking!

--Shannon