Please welcome my good friend Nicole who is doing a guest post for us today on her beautiful birthday cupcakes!  Thank you so much Nicole for sharing this with us.  Not only did they go perfectly with the decor, they were delicious!

Hostess Jo has graciously allowed me to blog about  the cupcakes I made for the 30^th Birthday

Celebration. Thank you Jo!

I began by looking at cupcake recipes that didn’t have raw eggs in the icing.  I was a little wary of exposing so many people  to possibly contaminated raw eggs. I found the Sweet Revenge Pure Vanilla Cupcakes  recipe on marthastewart.com.  I followed the recipe to the letter and they were a hit!  I bought the Mexican vanilla from  mexicanvanilla.com. On this website is a video of these cupcakes being made by Marlo Scott from Sweet Revenge. She has my dream job, a cupcake bar!

I loved the look of the parchment paper, but did not have the time to make each one. Fancyflours.com has baking cups that look the same in various colors.  I bought the white ones to match Jo’s décor and these white wavy candles that reminded me of the branches. I received everything I ordered from Fancy Flours very quickly and it was all wrapped very neatly in the cutest paper! I will definitely order from them in the future.

The next thing I wanted to do was the cupcake flags. These cupcake flags were my inspiration. I have Adobe Illustrator, but I am sure there are other programs you could use to create your own. At Wordlabels.com there is a tutorial that explains how to use .pdf label templates in Illustrator. I used this guide to create the flags, then printed them on stock paper. Included on the flags was “Happy 30^th Birthday” on one side and on the other side the

names of our birthday peeps and an Aries sign. They are time consuming at first, but once you create the flags it will be a breeze to do it next time. My husband helped with cutting and gluing the flags on the toothpicks. I could not find any clear crystal beads  (they were out at Michael’s!) so I will definitely do that next time. Even without the crystals the flags turned out great!

Thanks again Jo for allowing me to guest blog! The décor was awesome, the cupcakes were yummy, and the party was soooo much fun. Happy Birthday again to our friends!

Thanks again Nicole!  Your post is as fabulous as your cupcakes!