Happy Labor Day! It’s been quite a while since my last blog post as I’ve had a lot going on with weekend work trips, girl’s weekend and a fun weekend with my mom in Upstate, NY. Anyway, that is not what you came here to read about. Today I’m going to share more of the baby shower crafts I made recently. The theme was baby panda and I ordered these adorable invitations off of Etsy. Are they not the cutest diaper invitations ever?

Now that I have a Cricut, I could’ve made my own but I didn’t have one when I needed invites and the owner of the Etsy shop totally came through and made awesome invitations. Anyway, when I host themed parties I want everything to match as closely as possible, including the food decorations. So today I will share with you a super easy way to create edible cupcake decorations out of melting chocolate.

Where to Buy the Supplies…

You can buy this stuff almost anywhere. Michaels and JoAnne Fabrics tend to have a bigger selection of colored chocolate but you can sometimes find what you need at a grocery store as well. You will also need some wax paper and a sandwich, ziplock bag. That’s it!

Supplies

Melting Chocolate (I used light pink, black and white)
3 Sandwich Ziplock Bags
Wax Paper
Cupcakes (you can make them from scratch, use store bought ones, whatever you want)

How to Make the Cupcake Toppings…

First things first, you need the pictures. Because I wanted the baby pandas to match the invitations, I literally took a picture of the invitation on my phone and e-mailed it to myself. I then put the picture in a word document in the size I thought would be best and duplicated the photo until I got the number I wanted. I always make a few extra because you never know when you might screw one up, one breaks or it just doesn’t look right. For the pacifier, I googled pacifier coloring sheets and ended up with this photo,  which I also resized and duplicated to get the correct number:

In the end you will end up with some sheets of paper that look like this:

Line the sheets up on your workspace and tape them down so they don’t move. Next, lay wax paper on top of the sheets and tape that down. You should now be able to see the photos through the wax paper.

It’s now time to melt the chocolate. Follow the directions on the package, but you will need to heat the chocolate slowly. If you heat it too fast, it will clump up and you will have to toss it. I’ve done this quite a few times for lack of patience and it never works out for me. Microwave it in 30 second intervals until the chocolate is melted with a smooth consistency. Some people use cake decorating bags but those can get pricy and you have to clean them every time and who wants to do that? So I make this easy on myself and spoon the chocolate into a ziplock bag and cut a tiny, tiny piece off the corner so I can use it as a pen to trace the images.

Now, all you need to do is trace the pictures on the wax paper with the melted chocolate. For the pandas, I started with the black and traced the eyes, nose, mouth and ears and let it cool down before going back over it with the white. Make sure everything is covered with enough chocolate and there is no space between the colors otherwise they will not come off the sheet together.

You can see it looks pretty messy from the back but the good news is for this particular item, you can just flip it over and it will be flat and pretty on the other side!

The pacifiers were much easier since it was just one color:

Now, just pop them into the refrigerator or freezer to let them cool and harden. Sometimes I find it’s easier to put them on a cookie tray and put it in the refrigerator so it cools flat. When you remove them from the refrigerator or freezer be careful because they will just slide off of the wax paper. The nice thing about these decorations is you can make them a day or two before you actually need them. Just store them in the refrigerator in an airtight container and they will be ready to put on the cupcakes when you need them!

When you are ready, just place them onto your cupcakes. If your cupcakes have been in the refrigerator, you might want to let them reach room temp so the icing is a little softer. The decorations will be easier to place on the cupcakes and will stick really well if the icing is soft.

And that’s it! You now have adorable panda and pacifier baby shower cupcakes!

For the finishing touches, I bought “It’s a Girl” cupcake liners off of Amazon and they were super cute!