DIY Cupcake Toppers

As far as we are concerned, celebrating birthdays is a must...and making cupcakes for said birthday is a requirement.  Our friend Jamie turned 30, so naturally, we celebrated a couple of times.  The first event involved a night out with the adults (and some awesome cupcakes) but these cupcakes were for a BBQ-type event so they needed to be more "family friendly" than those for the first event.  I did a search on pinterest to get some ideas and found this great photo:

Unfortunately, there was no link...just this photo.  So we set out to make our own version.  We started with a search of Jamie's facebook page...we figured if she posted this picture of herself then she wouldn't mind seeing it reproduced several times and placed on top of capcakes, right???  

Once we selected the perfect picture I used Publisher to "design" the toppers.  I have a 2" circle cutter, so that is the size I went with.  I figured the punch would be much easier than cutting the image out by hand.  Plus, this shape left a perfect space to write "Happy Birthday".

Be sure to print the circle outline on the picture so it is easier to line up with the punch later.  I printed these 12 per page on photo paper (I liked that the paper was thicker so it stood up well).  Once it was printed I just turned over my punch and took off the plastic piece that generally catches the punch (so I could see exactly where it would cut) and cut out all of the circles.  Then we cut little birthday hats out of colorful paper.  We just randomly cut these different sizes and trimmed them later if needed.  Now I like in the sample picture how they used pom poms on the top of the hats, but it was last minute and I didn't have any of those!  So I just used a standard hole punch to make small white circles for the tops of the hats.  Again, this was last minute and we were in a hurry, so we didn't use any glue...we simply taped everything together.

Once the tooth picks were taped to the back, they were ready to go on the cupcakes!  And the best part...you don't need to get fancy with the frosting because honestly, everyone will be looking at the topper anyway!

We have made many cakes and cupcakes...but these are one of my favorites!  I laugh every time I look at them.

And the birthday girl LOVED them!  Happy 30th Birthday Jamie!!!!