Easy Dinosaur Cupcakes

Logan was my summer baby. This means that he will never celebrate his actual birthday at school. Since it is his first year of preschool, I decided that we could have the class celebrate his half birthday today. (Celebrating half birthdays is not something we have done before at our house, but it seemed appropriate in this instance, and the teacher agreed that it was a perfect idea.)

He even lucked out in that they ended up planning a field trip to the bowling alley! After the cupcakes had been handed out, someone announced his name and said it was his "birthday" over the P.A. system. I think he thought this was odd, but it didn't seem to stop him from gobbling up his cupcake while they all sang "Happy Birthday."

Meanwhile, I was just happy to see that he was devouring the whole cupcake since he usually has a habit of eating just the icing, and he had wanted me to make frosting shots for the party. (He didn't call them that, of course, but can you imagine giving cups of frosting to a group of preschoolers?!) Anyway, I was glad that these cupcakes were such a hit.

{Happy half birthday to my future paleontologist!}

To make them, I did a double batch of my favorite white cake recipe and a single batch of my favorite buttercream frosting recipe (which was not quite enough -- I had three cupcakes that didn't get frosted, but that was okay since there were plenty for the class. If I had used my angle spatula instead of piping the frosting it would have been plenty.). I tinted the frosting green, to simulate grass and topped them with dinosaur fruit snacks from Kroger. The most important part, though, was the dinosaurs.

I had been to several stores looking for gummi dinosaurs, and it turns out that nobody carries those in our area. I could have ordered some online, but that would have required more advance planning, and I wouldn't have wanted to pay the shipping cost, anyway! Fortunately, someone gave me idea of fruit snacks, which worked great. I placed three on top of each cupcake, mixing up the colors and types of dinosaurs so that there weren't duplicates on any one cupcake. (Yes, this is anal and unnecessary... I was happy with the results, and more importantly, so was my favorite future paleontologist.) I also discovered that fruit snacks hold up very well as cupcake toppers, all of the kids liked them, and as a bonus, they were very affordable. I bought two boxes at $1 each and still had a few packages left over.