April Fool's Day cupcakes

As I mentioned before, I am an overdoer. It's not something I hide. I don't care if people know I like to be the favorite student or employee. Being a parent has given me new opportunities to overdo things, and I take full advantage of things like holidays that aren't really celebrated. The kids and I have a great time doing this stuff together, so everyone wins, but I might be in trouble when Ben outgrows this kind of thing.

We sent two sets of cupcakes out on April Fool's Day for Ben's peers (it only occurred to me at the end of the day that it meant Ben was offered cupcakes twice in one day for a snack, but hey, it's a holiday, right?). One set went to his classroom and the other to his after school group. Both were good-natured April Fool's pranks.

Here are the dirt-and-worm cupcakes we made for his classroom:


Chocolate cupcakes and chocolate frosting, rolled in crushed chocolate cookies with gummy worm embellishments.

And here are the TV dinner cupcakes we sent to his afternoon group:





I found the instructions for these in the Hello, Cupcake! book. There is a whole "April Fools" section in it with lots of ideas I find to be acceptable as a joke. Something that doesn't look like a cupcake, but is=Good and Fun. Something that looks like a cupcake, but is meatloaf=Disgusting and Mean.

The mashed potatoes are just white frosting with caramel sauce drizzled on them and a lemon tootsie roll flattened to look like a pat of butter. The peas and carrots are also repurposed tootsie rolls, and the chicken legs are coated with crushed frosted flake cereal. The "bones" are made from white chocolate piped onto parchment paper before putting them into the cupcakes.

They were fun to make, but extremely time consuming. I had to ditch one of the designs I intended to include (the corn on the cob cupcakes will just have to come later, if I don't eat all of the yellow jelly beans first!) due to time constraints.