Adoption Celebration

This weekend my family celebrated the soon arrival of my nephew Jaxson.  My sister and her husband are adopting a 2 year old boy from China.  It is an exciting addition to our family, and the process has been a long time of planning, praying, and anticipating. You can read more about their adoption journey here.  They will be going to China and bringing Jaxson home within the next couple months. To celebrate the coming arrival, we had an adoption celebration today.  It was great to be able to spend time with friends and family.

The shower theme was Eric Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar.  I found an idea online through Pinterest to use cupcakes to create the caterpillar.  I had a test run a few weeks ago, and was able to tweak a few things to make it better for the shower.

Here's a picture of the full set-up.  I tweaked the approach by adding some chocolate features as well as putting Jaxson's name in chocolate on the cupcakes.

I had the idea to freehand Jaxson's name in chocolate to stand up on cupcakes.  I melted chocolate and poured it into icing bags with tips.  It wasn't too difficult to create, but the letters were a little thin. I quickly saw that the letters were going to melt, so I ended up letting them just melt into the icing.  It actually ended up working well.  The feet were also created by using the melted chocolate.  I decided to freeze these pieces until the start of the shower, which worked a lot better.

For the face I used a round cake pan.  I couldn't find any red icing, so I used red food coloring to create the color.  I had a can of vanilla icing, but was failed to notice until I opened it that it was actually tinted pink!  It actually worked out great, though, because even the pink took a lot of food coloring to create the red shade. I created the features of the face (eyes, mouth, antennae) out of chocolate.

After creating all the pieces I just had to arrange it to make the caterpillar.  I used a few extra cupcakes with white icing and green sprinkles to represent grass. The chocolate feet seemed to be a great hit with the kids!

I had a great time making the cupcakes and was happy to get to share them with our friends and family at the shower!