Beach Vacation Cupcakes

Here's the latest in cupcakery around the house: The Beach Vacation Cupcake. Yeah, that Teddy Graham is wearing a pink frosting bikini. I know.

PS. Sorry my pictures are a little blurry...camera settings are off, I guess, because pics look fine in the viewfinder screen, but turn out like this after all the goods are eaten and no more pictures can be taken.

Here's another take of the finished product, complete with Teddy Graham in green board shorts.

And a couple of the process, because you want to see the gigantic mess I made.

For the record, I have approximately no idea where this idea came from.
Very easily could have been I am Baker, because I basically want to either eat or try to make everything on her site, or could have come from somewhere on EpiCute, the cute food blog. Either way, I didn't make these from a recipe posted online. I cheated on the white cakes -- I was supposed to bring something to a potluck and didn't have time to make them fully from scratch. So I doctored up a cake mix -- trust me, this is a great way to make a mix taste homemade.

Then I frosted half the cupcake in vanilla butter cream frosting, and dipped it in a mixture of crushed up graham crackers and brown sugar. Check out my sweet cupcake beach.

Then I used the ribbon tip to wave blue vanilla butter cream frosting on the other half. I love frosting so much, some of these practically had tidal waves on them.

OCD alert: I love, love, cupcakes all in a row. It just makes me happy.

White Cake

Here's what you need:

* 1 white cake mix

* 1/4 C water

* 3/4 C oil

* 1 C sour cream

* 4 eggs

* 1 small package of instant vanilla pudding

* 1 tsp. really good vanilla.

Here's what you do:

* Mix up the cake mix, water and oil until everything is incorporated.

*Get the eggs in there and keep mixing.

* Slop in your sour cream, vanilla and pudding mix. Get it all nice and mixed up. And now you have amazing cake batter.

*Bake cupcakes at 350 for about 16 minutes. Don't overbake. This is my Achilles heel.