A very Dora birthday

This weekend's project was a very Dora inspired birthday cake and cupcakes for a very cute little girl named Ariya. I scoured Pinterest for some ideas and found a few different things I liked from different cakes and pictures, but not one that I liked altogether. I decided to take a few different ideas and try them out. I think they turned out pretty cute. 

The cake is vanilla and the frosting is a swiss meringue frosting (similar in taste to buttercream, a little less sweet, and MUCH easier to make look smooth - almost like a fondant finish). I was a bit disappointed that the meringue frosting doesn't color as well as regular buttercream. I used "electric" food coloring for the colors, but the purple on the cake still ended up looking more pastel than electric. You can see the difference in purple colors on the stars at the top and flowers on the sides of the cake. Same food coloring but totally different colors. Below is a picture of the cake before the Dora cake topper I bought (yeah, I'm not attempting to make Dora and that little monkey guy out of fondant quite yet...)

I made small batches of regular buttercream for the cupcakes and round dots at the base of the cake. Now those turned out to be the electric colors I had hoped for. The stars and flowers I made out of gum paste. Not quite as tasty as the homemade marshmallow fondant I make, but it's so much easier to work with plus it seems to dry so much faster, making it easier to cut out and use almost immediately when you're doing shapes like stars/flowers. I wouldn't use it on anything huge, but for shapes that no one is going to be eating I think it works great. Below is a picture of the cupcakes. I used an angled piping tip to create a flowery look underneath the flowers I cut out of gum paste. 

Here's the finished product after I delivered them to the party, including the Dora cake topper and candles. Some of the stars got a little crooked in the car on the way to the party...but I was just glad when I woke up on Sunday morning they were still attached to the wire holders* I had put them on the night before.

*I bought the curly wire holders at Michael's in the baking section. I think they're the Duff brand...also the same brand of food coloring I used for these. I cut them to different lengths and then attached a star to the top of each one.3