Easter Evolution & Escalation

This was last year's Easter effort, a Lindt gold bunny and chopping boards to serve as sky and grass.

This year, I originally planned to make something like Bakerella's Miniature Easter Basket Cupcakes, but when she posted an adorable-but-apparently-relatively-easy-to-make Easter Bunny Cake Pop a couple of weeks ago, I decided I wanted to attempt that too.

On Saturday night, I got my supplies out.

For the cupcakes, I made half a batch each of Billy's Vanilla and Billy's Vanilla Buttercream and tinted the buttercream light green.

I didn't want wrapped chocolate on the cupcakes, so I was going to top them with Cadbury mini eggs and an unwrapped Lindt gold bunny, but I was thinking that a white chocolate bunny would work even better. Stumbled upon a white chocolate bunny at The English Shop and was going to content myself with buying just one because of the price. However, I was holding it in my hand while browsing and it melted, so I had to buy another one for cosmetic reasons. I ate the melted bunny on my train ride home.

I realized when I unwrapped the foil that the bunny hadn't fared too badly, but by then its fate was sealed. 

Anyway, here's how the cupcakes turned out. As you can see, the Lindt bunny and the chopping boards made a return appearance.

For the cake pops, I halved the ingredients for Bakerella's red velvet cupcakes and skipped the red food coloring. 

I frosted the cake and then saved half to be eaten as actual cake while the other half would continue on the journey to become cake pops.

I couldn't find jordan almonds for the ears, but luckily spotted chocolate almond eggs at the supermarket. 

Here's the finished cake pop.

Admittedly, it doesn't look like the original and is barely (if at all) identifiable as a bunny, but I think it's cute just the same. In hindsight, the ears would have been more bunny-like if I'd kept the almonds closer together and not pushed them in too deep. The store didn't have any black edible ink pens nor white candy melt, so I substituted glitter glaze and white chocolate buttons instead. The upside of using white chocolate buttons was that I could use the leftover chocolate to make myself a nice cup of hot white chocolate.

I took photos of my creations...

...and then loaded them into the cake caddy to share with The Nieces later in the day since it was already Easter Sunday by the time I was done. The Big Niece was suitably impressed.