Going Jane: Unbearably cute and delicious cupcakes

I'm pretty much clueless as to how 8 years have flown by, but tomorrow my sweet (and to be honest, sometimes slightly sour) daughter turns 8 years old. We took her and some of her friends to Build a Bear for her birthday party on Saturday. But since Build a Bear doesn't serve food, I needed something for the "cake and ice cream" part of the party that would travel well to the mall. Here's what I came up with:

Now this isn't exactly what I orignally had in mind....I had been planning on using my Wilton "Cuddly Bear" cake pan...which was used by my mom for one of my brother's birthdays back in the day and used again my me in the '90s for cake decorating in FHA.

That was the plan....until at 10 p.m. the night before the party I discovered that the inner core part of the pan was missing when I went to bake the cake. Now that's a problem. So on to plan B.....

I decided on cupcakes, and I used the Double Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcake recipe I posted about back in July. Yum! Now Leah at Beyer Beware said what would make these even more delicious was some whipped icing...so I decided to give that a try, too.

I looked around for some bear-themed cupcake ideas, and I found this "Bear Hug for One" cupcake on the Wilton site:

I thought he was cute, but a little too monotone for me.

So I baked up the cupcakes, let them cool and iced them with Leah's favorite whipped icing. Now for the fun part.

I added chocolate discs for the ears...

I wanted the bears' muzzles to be a little lighter in color, so I took what was left of the whipped icing and mixed it with some big spoonfuls of ready-to-use Wilton decorator icing.

I used the Wilton disposable icing bags because I hate clean up. For that same reason, I skipped out on using a decorator dip and just cut the tip off of the bag since I wasn't doing anything special with the icing except getting it where I wanted it.

After the muzzles, I took some of the plain white decorator icing, put in in a separate disposable icing bag, cute a much smaller tip off and piped it into dots for the bears' eyes.

Then I added some chocolate chips to the eyes.

Now it's hard for me to get a nice black color, even with the paste icing coloring, so I cheated and bought this glitter black tube. Besides, little girls love glitter, right?

I used the black to pipe on the nose and mouth.

Ta da! All done and unbearably cute! The girls loved it, and between the trip to Build a Bear and the cupcakes, the girls declared it the "best day ever" and the "best birthday party ever!" Score one for Momma!