Beach Blanket Bingo Cupcakes by Martha

I'm getting ready to go to the All Candy Expo in Chicago in May and Libby Taylor at the National Confectioners Association showed me a cookbook from a baker who is providing a demo for attendees. The baker is a cupcake specialist. I thumbed through the cookbook and found a photo of some cupcakes I thought would be fun to bring to the beach. I brought the “parts” with me to the beach and everyone assembled their own cupcake after dinner one night as a surprise project. They were really quite easy and would be a great little project for kids.

The blankets are made from Starburst candies. Unwrap three and put them on a plastic sheet and zap for about 20 seconds. Cover with a second sheet of wrap and roll them out with a rolling pin and cut to size. (I ended up rolling them, and zapping again to get them to roll to the thickness that I thought would work best. Cut them to about 2” x 2”). I decorated some of the blankets with icing.

The faces are mini vanilla wafers and were probably the most time consuming. I just got a couple of tubes of Wilton icing and used a #1 tip for the eyelashes and a larger one for the hair.

To assemble the cupcakes: ice the cupcakes with white icing. Cut a marshmallow in half length-wise. Put one of the marshmallow halves at the top of the cupcake surface horizontally. It becomes the “pillow”. The second half of the marshmallow is placed perpendicular to the pillow and it is the form for the body. Put a little icing on the back of the decorated “face” and place it on the pillow. Mold the blanket a little and place it over the perpendicular marshmallow. Then take two Jelly Bellies and tuck them under the blanket for the socks.

Really, these were quite easy and the cool thing is that you can make the blankets and the faces ahead of time and toss them in a zip lock. Remember, there were many glasses of wine consumed before we got to this part of the evening ... you can tell by the one who's wearing two different colored "socks" ...