cupcake in a jar

At the time I made these cupcakes it was late to bed and early to rise for a whole week.  I'm surprised they even turned out, they were quite the chore.  But when my husband came home and said they were really cute all the hard work paid off.  Here's the inspiration...

my cakies

my cakies

Although the Paula Dean recipe for red velvet cupcakes as you see above sounds delicious, the mommy we threw the baby shower for loves funfetti cupcakes so I opted for them.  I used leftover mason jars from my wedding {more on that later}.  And I was too frugal to buy bakers twine so I found a similar yarn option at Michaels.  And this is what I came up with...

The process...

Using a circle Marvy clever lever mega craft punch {2.5"} I punched out the message I printed on card stock paper.  In this case my message simply said {thank you}.

The next step was to add the message card to the lid of the jar.  I decided to hot glue the pieces together, so when the recipient opened their jar the lid would be one piece.  I don't know it seemed like a good idea at the time...maybe it was an unnecessary extra step?

Next up is placing your cupcake in the jar.  For my test run I followed the directions on my cakies blog.  Unfortunately during the taste test phase I found the funfetti cake and vanilla frosting were just too sweet to layer.  So I decided to place one cupcake in the jar with an appropriate amount of frosting on top. Be sure to fill the cupcake pan no more that 2/3 full, any bigger and you will have a hard time pushing them through the opening of the jar.  With that said, use a smaller jar!  I was determined to recycle the jars from my wedding but there is no need to use the pint size for this project.

After the cupcake was in the jar, I used my Ateco reusable pastry bag without a decorating tip {just the coupling} to apply the frosting. This was relatively easy. I finished off the cupcakes with blue sugar sprinkles.

The final step was to add a spoon and attach a bow using the bakers twine look-a-like yarn.  Again the frugalista in me didn't want to spend the money on the disposable bamboo spoons so I opted for a compostable corn spoon {don't worry, I didn't order a thousand of them}.