ReUsable DIY Cupcake Toppers!

Beanstalk came up with the design for his birthday cake all by himself. He wanted a small cake with an Avengers "A",  surrounded by cupcakes, one for each Avenger. Cake decorating is not my forté, but I did my best, and came up with a new way to make DIY cupcake toppers in the process!

As I've said, I'm not much of an artist, and especially not with frosting, so I wanted to do cupcake toppers. I've made them before, for Pickle's Dr. Seuss Birthday, but they were paper, so not washable and reusable. If I made Avengers ones, I wanted to be able to use them again in his bentos - so I came up with the idea to make them somewhat like plastic plant labels, using the laminator we bought for Pickle's PECS! 

This photo was taken after the cupcake toppers had been washed and dried. They really are washable and reusable, yay!

How I made my laminated cupcake toppers:

I snagged the Avengers promo poster images from Google (probably breaking some copyright law but since I'm not selling or profiting from them I hope whatever authorities enforce that sort of thing will let it slide). I printed 2 of each image on card stock, cut them up and glued them together back to back, and arranged them between the sheets of laminating plastic.

(I put a sheet of tissue paper down on the table to keep any crumbs or dust from getting on anything - that's what the crumpled red background is.) Sorry, no pic of the laminating process, I needed both hands to keep the small sproutlets from messing with the hot laminator.  Here is the laminated sheet.

Next I cut them out in little stake shapes. 

Easy-peasy! If you have a laminator :)

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Here are my Avengers cupcakes and toppers, ready to assemble!

And, Avengers cupcakes, assembled! Heheh

I had more cupcakes than Avengers and couldn't find pics I liked of all of them solo, but I had everyone represented, even the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. So we had Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Nick Fury, Captain America, Hulk & Hawkeye, and 2 of the group. We had Avengers plates, cups, and cupcakes - now all we needed was the cake for the center!

I baked the cake in a loaf pan so I could cut it in half and stack it to make a cube. Here is my somewhat messy but recognizable enough Avengers "A" symbol - I was pretty pleased with how it came out!

Probably not exactly as he imagined, but pretty cool nonetheless.

Beanstalk was pleased :)

This is the only photo I got of him with his cake that didn't have other people's children in it. It's right before he blew out the candle, and that's the only time I took pictures. I always forget to take pictures during parties! Too busy participating... Oh well, I suppose I'd rather he have memories of me actually being part of things than have photos of the party without me in them :)

Happy 11th Birthday Beanstalk!