Mommy to Bee

My friend and coworker just had a darling baby girl! So I took the opportunity to throw her a baby shower. Right as I was trying to decide on a theme, my friend from high school, Alison over at The Handmade Shindig, posted these adorable Bee decorations. I took the idea and ran with it!

 

She made some water bottle labels as a free printable that I turned into cupcake wrappers. You can find them on her site here.

I had pinned a lavender cupcake recipe that Jen requested I make, so it fit right into the theme.
I followed the cupcake recipe exactly, but it turned out very heavy.

 

You can buy dried lavender buds at Whole Foods. They come in a box with just enough for the recipe! 

I got to use my new food processor (Mommy bought it for me as a thank you for helping with all of her home projects this summer). 

Mix the lavender in with the other cake-y stuffs. 
Next time, I might use less flour... as I said, it was a little heavy.

 

 The only change I made was using purple food color instead of mixing reds and blues. 

 

Wee, pretty! This is not the first purple cupcakes I've made... 

I forgot to room temperature things, so while the oven was preheating I put the butter and the cream cheese for the frosting on the stove. 

 

 

I used plain brown cupcake holders, then added Alison's cute water bottle labels to them. 

 

Then it was time to make the frosting! I can make a lot of frostings, and a cream cheese frosting is fairly simple. But this was my first time using honey. Also, I didn't have as much powdered sugar as I thought, so I improvised. 

I ended up using only two and a half cups of powdered sugar, and 5 teaspoons of honey.

 

It happened to be local grown honey from a student when I was teaching out in La Grange. 

 

Such a pretty yellow! I used a good amount (10+ drops) of yellow dye to get it this color. 

 

I used a pastry filler to frost the cupcakes, but forgot the rule about folding the edge down prior to filling, so I made a huge mess.

It tasted delicious! Unfortunately, it didn't set up as well as it should have, because I didn't have enough sugar. So I popped them into the fridge after frosting in case of melting.

 

I happened upon these adorable cake decorations at Walmart! 

 

I asked Alison for a matching banner, and she was happy to do a custom order for me. (BTW, she makes super-cute stuff you can find over at her Etsy shop.) 

 

Kept with my purple and yellow theme when procuring decorations. 

 

Do you know how hard it was to find crepe paper? I went to 4 different stores before Party City, and even then the selection was minimal! 

 

Printed a bunch of games I found from Chickabug.

 

Luckily, while searching for crepe paper, I found these adorable little boxes at Party City. 

 

Finger sandwiches and cupcakes! Keeping it simple.

 

Ellie insisted that nobody play this game. (Ellie's 4, so she wins.) 

Overall, a very fun day!

Oh, and here's the little darling, born over a month later!