Cupcakes!

Good morning, folks.
Last week, I was proud of myself for making lots of fun classroom supplies. They are waxing the floors of my school and I have not been in my classroom in quite a while. That meant I had more time to research and slowly walk around Dollar Tree to try to find inspiration for my classroom.
I have already posted about several things including
monster bookmarks,

the birthday box,

and I even posted about an awesome find I discovered at my Dollar Tree for crayon containers.

Today, you get a look at my students' back to school present. (Part of it.) You see, I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to bring in this next school year with a bang. Our open house night is the evening before school starts and I really wanted to get students excited about this next year. I decided to treat it as a party. Students will be welcomed with an awesome sign, be directed around the classroom with more adorable signs, and then collect a "treat" as they leave. What is the stereotypical party dessert? Cupcakes!
I had so many allergies last year (gluten, dairy, every type of nut) that I knew these babies would not be real cupcakes. (Besides, we cannot make any food item we want to give our kiddos and I don't really want to buy them a cheap cupcake from a grocery store or spend big bucks on delicious cupcakes from a bakery.)
Meet my faux cupcake complete with a candle.

Mmmm. The idea came from inspiration while at a dollar store. I had seen many cute fake cupcakes, but they looked messy or difficult or expensive to make. These ones cost about fifty-eight cents (I had everything except for the bowls and ramekins already).

Ingredients:
1 small prep bowl (the ones at the store came four for a dollar)
1 plastic ramekin type bowl (I bought these at the dollar store as well in a three-pack, but I can't find a link for them)

3 Zots
Colorful ruffle ribbon
Hot glue
M&Ms (or other small treat)

Directions:
1. I like to start making cupcakes beginning with the frosting, don't you? Begin by gluing the ruffle ribbon onto the prep bowl. (You could also paint the glass or just leave it. Either would look great. Or, for those glitter lovers out there, you could paint it with glitter paint. Super cute.)

2. Fill the cupcake (plastic ramekin) with desired treat. I used M&Ms because I happened to have some.

3. Place some Zots on the lip of the ramekin and firmly place the prep bowl on it. You could also place some hot glue dots onto the glass lid, wait a few seconds, and then press it onto the plastic bowl.

4. Celebrate!

An alternate step 4 is to add a candle. Fake candles are super easy to make also.
You need cute straws (I used striped paper straws) and yellow tissue paper.

Cut the straws to whatever candle length you would like. (My cupcakes are going on a cupcake stand eventually, so I wanted short candles, but super long candles would look great this week for the 4th of July.)

Just place two small squares of tissue paper on top of each other.

For the next step, I pushed the straw into the center so that I could twist it like so...

Finally, I dabbed a bit of hot glue in the straw and stuck the twist side into the straw.

You can just add that to the top of your cupcake! The day of our open house, I will probably add a dab of hot glue, but today I used another Zot to adhere it to the cupcake and it worked perfectly.

Cupcake a la candle. Perfect for bringing in a new year.

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