Sweet 16!

Last Monday, my baby turned Sweet 16! It was her golden birthday too! To celebrate her day she and several friends got dressed up...teen girls, they LOVE dressing up...and went to lunch. After paying for lunch, I took the girls back to our place where they changed into hiking/kayaking clothes. We hiked to the nearby lake where I had reserved kayaks for them. Winston actually led us to the lake and he and I stayed close while the girls were out. I took Winston to a cove where he could swim and I could watch, and photograph, the girls. After an hour on the water we made the return trip to our house. Dessert time!

Here's how the cupcakes I made and my daughter helped decorate turned out. Many thanks to Sweetcakes for her advice! Details below...

Store bought, ready-to-go, fondant was used for the flowers. I wasn't ready to experiment completely with this task, plus I left this part up to my creative daughter!
The cupcakes were a recipe from the FamilyFun cookbook. I got out of the habit of using store bought cake mixes about 10 years ago. I would certainly re-use this recipe and will gladly send it to anyone who requests is (as well as any other recipe I ever mention!). The only thing I did differently was to add food coloring. The cupcakes would have been more of a pale yellow than what we were wanting. I added 16 drops to the mix! :)

Sweetcakes advised me to bake and cool the cupcakes then cut out a cone part from the top. I wanted to added ganache to the middle of the cupcakes. After cutting the cone shape, I trimmed it so it would become a cap. Sweetcakes and I talked flavors and if you read back to my original thoughts you'd see I probably had too much going on...flavor-wise. White chocolate ganache was changed to chocolate ganache. Buttercreme frosting was almost cream cheese frosting until Sweetcakes reminded me it should be refrigerated. Not really a problem except that would make the ganache harder than what we were looking for. Cold ganache firms up, room temperature ganache is creamy! In the end I decided upon vanilla frosting that I colored pink. Both the ganache and the frosting were homemade.
Here's the ganache, made the day before. This was my first time making ganache and I didn't think it was going to work out. It seemed too runny after the recommended two hours of cooling. I let it sit longer though and it was perfect!

Putting it all together!

Well? What do you think?

Here's how they looked on the inside!

*****

And here's my Sweet 16 year old!