Picnic!

Well, apparently in 2008 a man was arrested in Florida after beating his girlfriend with a cheeseburger... multiple times. I'm not sure how this is possible.

This, however, was not inspiration to make these cupcakes. Too bad. I absolutely love these cupcakes. My favorite right now! And surprisingly enough I think they are the easiest so far to make look good.


Here what you will need:

Cheeseburgers-

• Vanilla cupcakes, however many burgers you want
• Chocolate cupcakes
• Frosting (any light color, I used vanilla for ease of whipping up)
• Food coloring- red, yellow
• Orange juice
• Sesame seeds, or granulated sugar if preferred
• (Optional) Sour apple bubble tape (or green frosting)

Corn on the Cob-

• Vanilla cupcakes
• Yellow cupcake liners, or any light color
• Vanilla frosting
• Yellow food coloring
• Yellow and yellow/white speckled jelly beans
• Yellow starburst
• Black decorating sugar
• (Optional) corn holdy thingy with spiky holdy thingies.

Uninvited ants optional of course-

• Black jelly beans
• Any cupcakes, I used leftover chocolate I had from making burger patties.
• Vanilla frosting
• Green food coloring
• Black decorating gel
• (Optional) Shredded coconut

Alrighty then! So let's start with the cheeseburgers. I do suggest cooking all the cupcakes at once though of course to keep your sanity. When doing this I made 7 vanilla cupcakes and 5 chocolate cupcakes. (Always make extra so you have options with shape of the cake or which one for what, etc). Also!! Overfill the chocolate cupcakes that you want to use to make the burger patties. We will be using only the "muffin top" to make those. 

Step 1- Freeze the vanilla cupcakes for a little bit (probably 10-15 minutes) to make it easier to get a clean cut when slicing. Do the same with the chocolate cupcakes you will be using to make the burger patties.

Step 2- Take cupcakes out of the freezer and slice. With the vanilla cupcakes that you will use for the buns, take the liner completely off and slice around the middle of the cupcake.  With the chocolate cupcakes for the patties, peel off the liner only around the top to give you easy access to just the top and make a clean slice across.

Step 3- Prep the buns. To get the sesame seeds (or granulated sugar) to stick onto the top of the cupcake, use a paintbrush, or some similar method, to apply a light coat of orange juice just on the top, and sprinkle the seeds or sugar on. They should stick and dry well. 

Step 4- Now that you have the buns and the burger prepped, it's time to add the condiments and stack it up.  Both the cheese and the ketchup are colored frosting. For the cheese, tint vanilla frosting a darker yellow. Spoon small clumps of the frosting around the edges of the bottom slice of the bun. When you place the burger patty on top of these clumps, they should push down to look like melted cheese coming out of the sides. I am absolutely shocked at how "real-life" my cheese turned out. It was so fun. The ketchup is vanilla frosting tinted red of course. This was piped out of a ziploc bag with the corner cut off. Never underestimate the piping power of a ziploc bag! I wasn't going to have lettuce at first because I wasn't too sure on how to go about it, but when I added it I was happy with it. My lettuce is some sour apple bubble tape I picked up, and used scissors to cut into it. Another option here is to just tint some frosting green and pipe it similarly to the ketchup. And there's your burgers!

Now for the corn on the cob-

I had a blast making this. And it's so simple yet looks so fun!

Step 1- Tint your frosting to a pale yellow. It will help make things look more natural. Then frost your 3 favorite vanilla cupcakes. 

Step 2- Push the yellow and white/yellow jelly beans into the frosting in rows. Alternate and switch colors up every once in a while to look more natural. As far as where to find the jelly beans.... Jelly beans are pretty easy to find right now because all the Easter candy is out right now and stuff. Jelly Belly has the best jelly beans for any sort of jelly bean project in my opinion. And what's really great is that you can get your flavors and however much you want of them at  most party stores! I was able to go to Zurchers and get all the beans in both the yellow and the yellow/white speckled for little more than a dollar. Definitely a better deal than getting the bags and having to sort through other colors. Unless you're a jelly bean fan... which I am not. Ok! So you should have 3 cupcakes covered in the beans.

Step 3- Line up the cakes and detail. I picked up my corn-holdy-display-thing from Honk's, a dollar store... by the way... they have the strangest things! A barbecue knife with a 2 foot handle?? Huh?? Anyway, When the cakes are aligned, you can add the "butter". My butter was a yellow Starburst. I softened it in the microwave for exactly 6.5 seconds. When it's softened you can kinda squish it to make it more realistic. Maybe squish a corner even more to look like it's melting down the side, etc. Then add the "pepper", which is just black decorating sugar sprinkled on. I also sprinkled with white granulated sugar to look like salt if you take a microscope to it, but that's really not necessary. 

You now have your corn!

And finally for the ants-

The ants are really an optional thing. I pretty much just had a couple extra cupcakes and wanted to add some detail to make the pictures I took more interesting. When I thought of the burger idea, I googled to see if other people had done it and found some people had put ants next to it and thought, why not? 

Step 1- Tint vanilla frosting green and frost the cupcakes.

Step 2- Add black jelly beans in the shape of ants. After adding I put in the freezer for a little bit to make it sturdier. My frosting was a little wet.... there's pros and cons to wet or dry frosting. But the frosting just needed to dry quicker so the jelly beans would not slide anywhere.

Step 3- Use black decorating gel to draw the rest of the ants' bodies. Remember that they have 6 legs. Ha.

Step 4- If you want coconut around the outside, you can put that on. I was thinking it might give the idea of looking grassy, but I'm not sure that I accomplished that! So it's very optional. Honestly I probably wouldn't add the coconut next time.  

But there you go! 

Like I said, I found that these cupcakes actually were not difficult and turned out very cute! I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for something fun to make pretty quickly. Enjoy!