A couple days ago I posted another circus birthday, but for a boy. This time, the circus party was for a little girl.
I definitely wanted to do circus tents again, because I loved the way my last ones turned out.
I recently bought a big assorted set of Wilton cutters. (Actually didn’t get too many duplicates, which was awesome! What does everyone do with all those duplicates anyway? I have a bag started..) Anyway, in it was a balloon cutter, and after seeing the balloon cupcakes for my last circus party, I thought the balloon would be a good addition to this cookie party.
(If I weren’t doing these for 2 year olds, I would have stuck a sting to the back of each balloon with a dab of frosting. I figured 2 year olds wouldn’t know to pull it off so I just left it out.)
I came across these adorable circus cookies by Nicole of Life’s A Batch a while back, and the mama for these cookies just loved them when I sent her the link. From these cookies I drew inspiration for the pink elephants.
We also liked the idea for popcorn buckets. I had seen these by Bridget of Bake at 350 a while back, and I also loved the ones from Life’s a Batch, so I combined the ideas into something I could create with my style of frosting/icing.
For the actual popcorn kernels, I was having a hard time deciding what I wanted to do. First I tried using only icing, and planned on layering blobs to create “popcorn.” But because my icing is similar to glaze, it wasn’t holding it’s popcorn shape the way I wanted.
I scraped that idea (literally) and kind of “gave up” and turned to my trusty buttercream… just started creating my blobs. They were kind of bumping into each other and not really looking like kernels anymore.. They needed butter. Problem was, I didn’t have anymore buttercream to dye yellow for the butter. I definitely didn’t want to make a whole new batch just for a couple tablespoons needed. So I winged it and started using icing. Not something I’ve ever done before. I outline in buttercream, fill in icing, and use buttercream for details. Icing on top of blobs of buttercream? What the hell is that?
I’ll tell you. It’s butter. MELTED butter.
Perfection. Accidental perfection.
Cookie Carrie 