As part of her WOW! Women on Writing Blog Tour, book author, Gayle Trent is doing a guest post on cake decorating with kids. I’m thrilled to have her posting here at My Readable Feast!

Gayle’s new book Murder Takes The Cake is a story about Daphne Martin, a forty-year-old divorcee who has started fresh in a new home with a new career, Daphne’s Delectable Cakes. Then Daphne finds her first client dead and the thrills begin! The book even comes with recipes.

Gayle also blogs at Fatal Foodies and loves to decorate cakes.

Cake decorating with your children
by Gayle Trent

Baking with your children is such a fun, rewarding experience. Take one kitchen, one mom, two children (in my case), a cup of warmth, liberal dashes of sweet smells and a pound of giggles. The other ingredients (chocolate-covered pretzels, M&Ms, Junior Mints, gummy worms, Air Heads, which, when softened, make wonderful ribbon-like roses, marshmallows, etc.) depend on what you’re making.

With children, cupcake decorating is often a better option than cake decorating. Cupcake decorating allows the decorator to eat his or her own creation, and that can be a good thing if the creator’s decoration of choice is a gob of gummy worms. Cupcakes are versatile and provide a small yummy canvas for young artists.

During the holidays, children’s imaginations generally surpass our own frazzled attempts at creativity. For example, they can easily see how a cupcake sitting on its side on a white doily can become a pilgrim lady in a bonnet. Add a square cookie and a miniature peanut butter cup for a hat, and you have her husband.

Here are some easy cupcakes you can make with your children:

Pig

Frost a cupcake with pink-tinted frosting. Add a pink jumbo marshmallow (the pastel ones might be a bit more difficult to find, so you might want to call some of your local stores to see if they have them) to the middle of the cupcake. Make two marks like this 1 1 on the top of the marshmallow with black gel icing for the pig’s nose. Add M&Ms or Reese’s Pieces for eyes. If you’d like, add triangular crackers or cookies for ears.

Flower Pot

Let’s put those gummy worms to good use! Place a chocolate-iced cupcake in the top of a small terra cotta pot. (The kids can decorate the pots with paint beforehand, if they’d like.) Place either artificial flowers or candy or cookie flower lollipops into the top of the cupcake, and have the gummy worms crawling out of the pot.

Butterfly

Any round cookie cut in half and turned round edge to round edge will form a butterfly’s wings. A Tootsie Roll body, some licorice or pretzel stick antennae and Necco wafers and Skittles provide colorful spots.

Cat

Old-fashioned cream drops cut in half (by mom) make cute ears for a black cat cupcake. Add the cream drop halves to the top of the chocolate-iced cupcake, add green or yellow candy eyes, a pink jelly bean nose and pretzel stick whiskers.

Linus Van Pelt in the Pumpkin Patch

Ice a cupcake with white frosting. Sprinkle green-dyed flaked coconut liberally over the top. Add mellocreme pumpkins. Tape an image of Linus from any Peanuts comic onto a toothpick and insert it amid the pumpkins. (Don’t sell these cupcakes, though. I think it would be a copyright infringement!)

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