Cowboy Cupcakes

Recently, I was asked to make some cupcakes for a friend's baby shower with a cowboy theme. They said they would be using red and brown for decorating with focus on bandannas, cowboy hats, and sheriff stars. I also had the adorable invitation to help use as inspiration.

Based on the size of the guest list for the shower, the hostesses asked for two batches of cupcakes - one in the new mom's favorite of yellow cake with chocolate frosting and one chocolate cake with whatever frosting I wanted, so I picked cream cheese frosting.

I really wanted to play up the bandanna component on the cupcakes, ideally I wanted bandanna cupcake liners, they would have been perfect. Unfortunately, the only place I found that had red bandanna cupcake liners was a shop in California and there wasn't enough time to have them shipped...so I improvised. I bought some red bandannas at Hobby Lobby and after trying a few different ideas, I settled on tying strips of the bandanna around the bottom of the cupcakes (I just used a plain red cupcake liner). Even though it's not originally what I had envisioned, I think they turned out really cute.

Since I don't have a lot of time these days, I wanted to do something pretty simple for the decorations so it would be quick and easy to get done. I found the cowboy boot picks at Hobby Lobby and decided to use those for only one batch of the cupcakes, to use them for all of the cupcakes it would have been a little too much.

I couldn't find any other pre-made toppers any where, so I decided to make some toppers for the other batch of cupcakes. The fastest and easiest option was to make chocolate cowboy hats. I used the same method I used to make the chocolate butterflies...I found a graphic I wanted to use, taped it to a cookie sheet, covered it with wax paper, melted the chocolate in a squeeze bottle and traced over the designs, then put them in the fridge to set. (It's much faster than royal icing toppers (which would have required days to dry) and faster than fondant (which I didn't have time to color, roll, and cut).

I used decorating tips to frost the cupcakes with a simple swirl design. Half of the chocolate frosted cupcakes also got red and yellow sprinkles, all of them got the cowboy boot picks. Half of the cream cheese frosted cupcakes got chocolate sprinkles, all of them got the chocolate cowboy hats.

When you grouped them all together it created a great visual that went very well with the party theme.

I'll post pictures of the party decorations next...you won't want to miss it, the ladies did a really good job!

Enjoy!