Spenser Head Cupcakes

April 25th was the last time I posted - oh my.  Apologies, life took over.  I have lots to share!  Bit by bit I will do so. 

Today's post is about graduation cupcakes. Last year, I made cakes for my son and daughter's graduations.

My daughter's college graduation cake.

My oldest son's high school graduation cakes - inside the cakes were also red and gold - 4 layers!

I got up early and baked and decorated and it took FOREVER! So this year, I went with cupcakes.

Perk #1 - My VERY HELPFUL AUNT agreed to make the cupcakes for me - yay (while I took off to a few grad parties and left the relatives at home to do all the hard work).  We made two varieties - both from cake mixes (yes, completely going the easy route this year).  One was a RED VELVET cake mix to which we added yellow icing (red and gold are the school colors) and red sugar sprinkles. 

Another variety we made vegan by buying a vegan cake mix of the chocolate variety and adding a soda - yes, just a plain old can of soda to the mix.  Apparently you can do this with any cake mix and any type of soda.  I read about it HERE.  The vegan cupcakes had white icing and yellow sprinkles, continuing the red and gold idea. (I did say vegan but I didn't say healthy - it was cake and icing after all).

But, topping off the cupcake with a "Spenser Head" was the BEST!  I got the idea after watching the awesome party decor ideas video from pixels2pages (requires a subscription to watch the video) but you can find inspiration from P2P by visiting their website or their facebook page.

I love using my storybook creator software (on sale right now for $48.71) for hybrid, outside the box type of projects and this one fit the bill... I opened a custom project in SBC 4.0, sized it to an 8.5 X 11 paper to fit my printer and added a 1.5 inch circle to a page.  I filled the circle with a color, added a photo and text and copied and pasted it several times until I had an entire column of circle designs.  I created 5 columns of circles.  I opted for 3 separate designs. 

The red and gold designs went on the red velvet cupcakes and the blue design topped off the vegan cupcakes.  The red and gold designs celebrated my son's high school graduation and the blue design celebrated the college he chose.

I chose the option in SBC to save my page as a jpg.  I saved it in a file on my computer.  Then I loaded a piece of white cardstock into my printer and printed a few sheets of Spenser heads! 


I then cut apart the columns of circles using my Rotary Trimmer (also on sale right now for $22.50) and then used my Circle Maker to punch out each topper. 



I cut out some plain white circles from another piece of white paper.  Using my tape runner,

on sale until July 25th for $6.71 - 25% off!

I taped a toothpick between the decorated circle and the plain circle.  Then I just had to stab the toothpicks into the cupcake and VOILA -instant happy cupcake heads~!

Everyone loved them.  AND they made the dessert table look so festive and graduation-ish - don't you think?

HAPPY HYBRID SCRAPPING!