pink and purple and a special little one

A very special little girl, H, turned one last week, so of course honorary Auntie Brooke had to pull out all the stops to add something special to her birthday party. After all, I owe this little one a lot — she hung out in mommy's belly long enough for her to be the matron of honor in my wedding last September, and even held off until two days after we returned from our honeymoon to arrive (on her due date, no less). Girlfriend has been on my side all along.

For H's big birthday, I took a second stab at Bakerella's cupcake bites (first attempt was back in July with a patriotic theme), and I am proud to say that I am kiiiind of getting awesome at this cupcake bite thing.

This go-round, I used this variation of the recipe with candy molds (which I somehow missed on the website last time). This made things much less messy and the overall process a bit easier. The final result was not nearly as perfectly coiffed as Bakerella's bites always seem to be, but that's okay... we'll just say that mine have more "character."

I started with red velvet cake and made my cake balls.

Since I was using the molds for the bottom part of the cupcakes, I had the genius idea to put my melted chocolate in a plastic baggie and cut one corner off to neatly squeeze the chocolate into the molds. Revolutionary, I know.

After I squeezed the chocolate into the molds, I placed the cake balls in the chocolate and waited for it to harden.

They popped out really easily once they were in the freezer for a few minutes.

Then came the most fun part: decorating time. There was no shortage of pink and purple here — no, sirree. I had pink and purple sugar crystals. I had stopped by a local candy store earlier in the week to buy pink and purple M&Ms. I even stooped so low as to buy food coloring with Hannah Montana on the packaging. (What can I say — it had all of the colors I needed. Don't hate.)

I used white melted chocolate and mixed a bunch of different pinks and purples to have a nice mix of colors. The blue came in handy as the purple alone sort of looked the same as the lighter pink. Adding some blue made a perfect purple.

Then I dipped... and decorated... and voila! Aren't they purrty?

Happy first birthday, Miss H!