Maows and Bows

Kate turned two!

She still obsessed with all things girly.  But she shows a definite proclivity for cats and hair bows these days.

Her name for cats is the sound they make, which she says, "Maow."  She has a little stuffed cat she likes to sleep with and when she asks us to find it in the depths of her blankets in her crib, she always pleads, "Maow."  M and I decided to name her little cat Chairman.  Now we both get a nice chuckle when we go searching for her little Chairman Mao.

No outfit is complete for Kate without a bow in her hair.  Preferably a clip AND a bow.

Whenever she sees me sitting writing something on paper, she insists that I draw her a cat with a bow.  

Logical birthday theme?  The most famous cat WITH a bow of all. Hello Kitty of course:

If you find yourself wondering how I made these buttercream Hello Kitty cupcakes, feel free to read on.  Or if you don't care, that's fine by me.  Go on your merry way.

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I used frozen buttercream transfers to make the little Hello Kitties.  I've always wanted to try this technique.  The results were fabulous (if I do say so myself) and it was suprisingly easy.

First, I found an outline image of the Kitty herself, made it the right size and copied it as many times as I wanted cupcakes.  (I didn't have to mirror the image like you normally would because Hello Kitty is ambi-drawable.)  Then I printed it off and taped some waxed paper over it.  I put it on a cutting board and then went at it with a tube of black frosting and a simple round tip.

I outlined the whole image first:

Next I switched to red frosting and colored in her oh-so-important bow:

 Then I filled the face in with white:

All the frosting color changes would have been a pain, but thanks to this idea, it was easy and not very messy at all!

Then I took the pink frosting I was going to frost the cupcakes themselves with and piped around the outside of Miss Kitty to support her little whiskers.  The main idea here is to think backwards.  Pipe the things you want to have look like they are on top first and the things you want to look like they are on the bottom last.  As my last step I piped a layer of the same pink as the cupcakes over the whole thing to give it some beefiness.  When I was all done I got my finger wet so it wouldn't stick and pushed down all over the design to make sure everything was flat and as air-bubble-less as possible.
 

Then I popped them all in the freezer for about an hour.  When I took them out, they easily came off the waxed paper in one piece.  In fact they were small enough that I could just pop them off the waxed paper and stick 'em on the frosted cupcakes like stickers.  Delicious buttercream stickers.