DIY Cupcake Stand

Hello cupcake lovers!

Who doesn't love cupcakes? I am especially enamored of their lovely, personal-sized nature. A cupcake tower full of cupcakes is an excellent solution for individual servings for the guests. The addition of an actual cake, small, made for the cake cutting ceremony itself, makes using cupcakes feasible, and understandable, without breaking away from too much tradition.

So, with that in mind, here is my "Under $25, Ultra-Awesome-Pretty-Glass" cupcake tower. I bought all the plates and glasses from my local thrift store.

Basically, here's what I needed to make this beauty:

1. 4 glass serving plates - ranging in size. I'd bet my biggest plate was about 18-20 inches across, and each plate was about four inches smaller around than the last one.
2. 3 glass cups, vases, or other round, sturdy glass objects, to place between the plates to give levels to the cupcake tower
3. E6000 glue (I bought mine on sale from Michaels for $1.99)
4. Glass beads, or other decorative beads, for hot gluing around the base of each glass, or just for decoration
5. A hot glue gun

Here's the deal with E6000 - it's not supposed to go near food, so I only used a little bit (you don't need that much, otherwise it will drip!) and then I placed glass beads around the base of the glasses (where the E6000 touches the plate below it) so that no food comes directly into contact with the glue, ever. Honestly, I don't know if this is the safest way to do it, I just wanted the tower to be extra sturdy. You could probably make the tower with a hot glue gun alone (honestly, my hot glue gun almost got stuck to the tower at one point, and it was a huge pain getting it off, showing that hot glue has a mighty grip on glass).

In any case, this is how I made the tower! I don't expect any problems.

First, get the plats and cups together, make sure everything fits on top of everything else and that you like the way it looks.

 

Now, for each layer you want to create, place a ring of E6000 on the plate, and a layer on the bottom (or top) of the glass you are attaching. You can use a wax pencil to gauge where the cup will go on the plate so you can put the glue in the right spot, or you can eyeball it, which I did, to...decent effect.

 

 

Lastly, after all the layers were put together, I used the hot glue gun to add colored glass around the base of each of the glasses, and to do a little decoration on some of the levels. 

Cupcake Wedding Cakes

Hello!

So, there will be many posts in the following days, as I've just come back from a wonderful weekend at a friend's wedding, and I have a lot of new ideas!

But today, I just want to talk about wedding cakes - specifically wedding cakes made of cupcakes! I think this is an excellent idea. With the right batter and frosting, cupcakes are some of the most delicious little bites of heaven. They are incredibly convenient for the wedding, so everyone can just grab a bite, and if you want to still have the "cutting the cake" moment, you can do what many of these people did, and have a normal cake on top with cupcakes around the bottom. Some of the best cupcakes I've ever had were at Georgetown Cupcake, which I HIGHLY recommend. If you are ever in the DC area, go and snag a few to taste.

NOTE: I was perusing some cupcake wedding cake blog posts this evening, and I found a really neat tip from a chic who did the cupcake wedding cake herself - she went to a glass shop and got a quote for an 18", 16", 14", 12", 10", 8" and 6" round 1/8" thick round glass cut with polished edges. She was quoted at $27! She went to a local hobby store and bought some crystal candle sticks to put together the layers (the candle sticks were about $1 apiece), and she estimates the tiers will hold about 100 regular cupcakes when done. She's using trimmed down doilies to put around the cupcakes, but I know you can buy a whole bunch of cupcake "collars" from those Oriental Trading websites for pretty cheap as well. Here is a link for 24 of them for $3. There is an excellent article about assembling a tiered cupcake wedding cake here.

Here are some nifty pictures of cupcake wedding cakes.

This amazing cupcake wedding cake inspired the tiered cupcake cake example mentioned at the end of blog post above. I just love the cherry-blossom looking design on the top wedding cake! I also love how in the interpretation (see the linked article about assembling a tiered cupcake cake) they placed all the little cupcakes around the base.