Spring Marshmallow Cupcakes {Easter Cupcake Chaos-pt.2}

They say necessity is the mother of invention, right? Maybe that's why I keep coming of with new ideas.

I told you about decorating Easter cupcakes with 15 pre-teens for our church Easter party. That was Thursday (same day I took treats to my daughter's school for her birthday). Friday was her birthday party (held among the cupcakes) and when we came out of the birthday fog on Saturday morning, we still had several dozen cupcakes left to decorate. (I way over-planned on cupcakes, btw. Oh well!)

We began to crank out more chick and nests, until we were out of jelly beans and coconut, and left with the prospect of taking all of my children (plus friends that were there to help) to the store or scrounging around in the pantry to find something else we could do. I opted for the later when I found a package of marshmallows and remembered the cupcakes my friend, Chef Tess, had made when she was on TV back in the fall. While my daughter started fretting about what we were going to do and thought that marshmallows would make funny looking eggs, I got the kitchen scissors and started cutting the petals. The thing that is awesome about this technique is that cutting the marshmallows actually shapes the petals for you. I had a bunch of petal dust in my supplies (from a Martha Stewart Kit ordered years ago) and lightly brushed the insides of the marshmallow petals with the edible powder.

The candy centers were made from the only candies we had left--easter colored candy corn. We cut the ends off of some of the candies, but I think the girls ended up sticking the whole candy corn up-side-down into many of the cupcakes. Aren't they so fun for Spring? And still something easy enough to do with my pre-adolescent helpers!

Somewhere in the middle of marshmallow cutting, inspiration struck again:  

A little pink petal dust, and those marshmallow "petals" look like bunny ears! The eyes are mini chocolate chips and, the nose is the end of a piece of Easter candy corn. Small jelly beans would also work. My young helpers LOVED these, and we made several.

Until we ran out of marshmallows....