Ladybug Cake and Cupcakes

Cake 

Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures along the way to show how I made Blakely's ladybug cake and cupcakes. So I took a few pictures of the tools I used and I'll try to be as descriptive as possible for those of you who may try this in the future.

For her cake, I used a sports ball pan that I bought at Michael's. I put chocolate cake batter in both sides. Be very careful not to fill it too much. At first, I put the batter about 3/4 of the way up the pan. But when it started rising, it began spilling over the sides so I took quite a bit of batter out.
After it finished baking, I let it cool for just a few minutes and then took the cake out of the pan so it wouldn't stick. It fell apart just a little but once it was covered in icing, it turned out alright. I wasn't quite sure what to do about the head of the ladybug and I didn't need both sides of the cake. So I took a small portion of one side of the ball cake and cut it into a half circle for the head. Then I used icing to stick it to the other half of the cake.
To frost the cake, I used a Wilton 2D star tip and began piping red and black icing all over. I placed the cake on a 10" round cardboard and then covered it with aluminum foil. To do the grass, I used the Wilton grass tip (#233) and just went to town with it. It was the first time I ever used that tip and it was really easy and really fun.

Decorations

For the cupcake and cake decorations, I used premade gum paste from Michael's and dyed it using icing colors. I have used fondant in the past and found the gum paste to be much easier to use. For one, it is a LOT cheaper to buy white gum paste and then dye it the colors I needed rather than buying pre-colored fondant. Also, I found that the gum paste was easier to dye and handle than fondant.

When dying the gum paste, I used latex gloves from K-Mart so my hands wouldn't get gross. After the gum paste was the correct colors, I used fondant cutters to get the shapes. For the flowers, I used a flower fondant cutter that came in 3 different sizes.
For the butterflies, I cut them and then gently folded the wings in so it would look like they were flying. Then, I set them on folded paper and let them dry. After a few hours, they became hard and the wings permanently stood up. To get the small dots on the butterflies, I used blue glitter gel and just dotted them.

For the small ladybugs, I rolled red and black gum paste into small balls and then stuck them together using a little black decorative gel. I then used the black gel to add the dots and stripe down the back.

My colors for decorations and frostings.

Gum paste will keep for a really long time so I made the decorations a week in advance. To keep the decorations fresh, put them in a sealed container and set them on the counter. To dry the decorations, leave them uncovered on the counter.  
Don't ever refrigerate or freeze gum paste!!

Cupcakes

I wanted several flavor options for the cupcakes so I used my strawberry cream cupcakes for the pink ones and my dark chocolate recipe for the green grass cupcakes. Both of those frostings were buttercream with pink and green dye. However, I tried a new recipe for the blue cupcakes.
My husband LOVES lemon cupcakes so I used my strawberry cupcake recipe but instead of adding strawberries, I added lemon zest from two fresh lemons and freshly squeezed lemon juice from one of the lemons. I made my buttercream frosting but added lemon juice from half a lemon and zest from a whole lemon. It tasted so fresh and light! They were absolutely delicious and I will definitely be trying them again.

I hope this was easy to understand. Happy baking!