Owl Cupcake Toppers

This weekend I will be hosting a baby shower at church (along with my trusty church shower teammates).  We will be celebrating the upcoming arrival of a baby girl, and our theme for the shower is owls with pink and purple.

I decided to make fondant toppers for my cupcakes.  These need to be made a couple days ahead of time so the fondant can dry out to hold its shape.

Here's what I came up with:

I looked around Pinterest and just copied what I liked best about each version of owl cupcake toppers I found.

I used my Christmas light bulb cookie cutter to cut out the body of the owl.  I used my Easter egg cutter to cut off the bottom and top of the Christmas light bulb.

Then I used my leaf cutter to make the wings.  I put purple wings on the pink owls and pink wings on the purple owls.

I made the marks on the owl bellies by using this frosting tip:

I used a large round frosting tip to cut out white circles for the eyes.

I tinted some fondant orange to make the beaks and feet.

I had to cut teeny tiny diamonds for the beaks.  I wasn't in love with the triangle beaks I saw on most of my inspiration pictures.  There was no shortcut here.  I just had to cut strips of orange fondant and then cut it into diamonds with a knife.

For the feet, I cut out little flowers and then cut those in half.

I had some leftover fondant, so I cut out large white circles for the owls to rest on.  The feet weren't adhering well to the owl bodies, so this way I could just stick them to the circle backdrops.

The last step was using a black food coloring marker to draw in the pupils of the eyes.  Since this is a baby girl shower, I made the eyes girly.

All done!  I'll bake the cupcakes tomorrow, but I'll wait until right before the baby shower to frost the cupcakes and put the owls on top of the frosting.  If you put the toppers on too early, the fondant absorbs the moisture from the frosting and it wilts and melts.  Not cute.

*Just in case you're interested, I make homemade marshmallow fondant following the recipe/tutorial here.  I promise you this fondant is so much more delicious than store-bought fondant!  I put wax paper on cookie sheets and use those to lay out my fondant shapes while I assemble them and they dry.  That's the ugly background in these pictures. 

Basically, I get to have adult Play-doh time when I make fancy toppers for baby shower cupcakes. :)

Jessica