My friend Ashlee is celebrating her birthday with a trip to Cancun, so I made her some cupcakes combining the birthday and beach themes.
I started out pretty successfully, I think, to create a beach-y theme by sprinkling some ground-up shortbread cookies over very wet blue icing to make a sand and water look. To these I added some adorable sea creature sugar decorations that I bought from
Copper Gifts Dot Com. Then I added some green icing seaweed and those cupcakes turned out pretty well:
But in the words of the late great Chuck Thompson, the wheels kind of came off the cart when I ran out of those cute little sea creatures but still had about a dozen cupcakes to decorate. So I had this sheet of googly eyes (doesn't everyone?) and I decided I'd try to create some sort of suggestion of a whimsical sea creature buried in the sand. I stuck two googly eyes on the sand, but the eyes alone just looked menacing and bizarre. That's when I decided to try to make a crab claw out of icing and put it sort of arcing over the crab's eyes. That was what was supposed to happen. I think the result kind of looks like that weird Geico Insurance Company ad campaign where the stacks of dollars have eyeballs. But cute. Really cute nonetheless.
Moral of the story: googly eyes are cute no matter what you do to them.
My friend Ashlee is celebrating her birthday with a trip to Cancun, so I made her some cupcakes combining the birthday and beach themes. 
Moral of the story: googly eyes are cute no matter what you do to them.