Wedding Shower Cupcakes

My mom has been helping me A TON with Lily this summer so I can work during the day, so when she asked me to help her make cupcakes for a bridal shower, I jumped at the chance to pay her back. I'd also been dying to try some grown up cupcakes, and I loved the examples in Hello, Cupcake and What's New, Cupcake? of cupcakes patterned after pretty fabric and pretty designs.

I was all set to make the brown and blue cupcakes on page 118 of What's New since they matched the wedding colors, and I bought all the things I'd need. So I was thrown for a loop when the Shower Czar informed me that someone else was making chocolate cupcakes and I'd have to find something else. Really? Did this someone else already have her stuff? Did she have a super cute design? Probably not. I fretted for a while and even considered defying the czar-- I mean, is there such a thing as too many chocolate cupcakes? In the end I decided I was too chicken to defy the czar, and back to the store I went for the ingredients for lemon cupcakes (I used the one in the back of Hello, sans the poppyseeds).

The icing on the proverbial cake, or cupcake, was that my syle-queen niece, Isabel, came over to help me decorate them. We monkeyed with a few techniques and several different designs before deciding that it would look cool to have several different designs on the plate. The plate, though beautiful, turned out to be too small to fit all of the cupcakes, so we were able to sample them. We decided that they were, after all, the perfect Sunday afternoon wedding shower cupcakes. Chocolate schmocolate.