Colored Sprinkles for a lot LESS....

One of our special birthday “traditions”.....  I make each member of our family a unique themed cake for their day.  This has been a fun, yet challenging.  Each cake is a SURPRISE which does not allow for me to practice the design before their birthday.  There have been many birthday-eve nights that I wonder WHY I dreamed up this tradition….HOWEVER…it has also been a wonderful opportunity for creativity—not just the design of the cake, but coming up with ways to re-do the design elements in a frugal way instead of expensively.

This year’s themed cake for my daughter came from a book called, “What’s New, Cupcake?”.  

Yes...these are the actual ones I made...it is NOT a picture from the book! 

They were remarkably simple to make--just time consuming!

  I termed my daughter’s cake as a “bouquet of flowers”. 

In this design, it required using many colored sugars to coat the “petals” (made of sliced marshmallows).  Those Cake-Mate colored sugar sprinkles are expensive!!  (But they are even more expensive when considering a project like this!!)  Soooo….for this cake I learned HOW to color my own sugar!  (Holy Cow!!  The Cake Mate company is making a fortune on  those little bottles of colored sugar!!)

HOW to make your own colored sprinkles:
1) Put some white sugar in a plastic baggie.

2) Add a couple drops of food coloring

3) Mix it up.  You will need to knead it a little with your finger tips.  Initially, the drop of food coloring dissolves the sugar it lands in making a wet, grainy clump of sugar.  BUT as you knead it, the color spreads out and the sugar returns to its “dry” state.

Make as many colors as you like....I used yellow, pink, purple, blue and white to color the "petals" of my daughter's bouquet!

Happy Stretching Pennies...