Cupcake Tree ~ revisited

I am so happy with my decision to do cupcakes and to display them in tiers like a traditional cake.

read about cupcake stand ideas here

I took this, a naked Cupcake Tree:

and turned it into this:
read about the flavors here

what i did was take a few rolls of solid blue wrapping paper and wrapped all the peices, attatching with tape. Assembled all the peices. (super easy to assemble, btw) then we hot glued the orange ribbon around the edge of each tier. then, using double sided tape, my bridesmaid put paper doilies all over each level. The cupcakes were organized by flavor, and on the table under the stand, i put hand stamped signs for each flavor.

The top tier was a Big Top Cupcake. I have a lovely friend Tresha, who owns a cake decorating buisness, Pink Princess Cakes who came over with some other friends, and family members to help frost all the cupcakes. That day, I was going to bake the jumbo cupcake, but it didnt turn out (looked done, but was batter still on the inside, (thats what I get for not following directions) so, being as wonderful as she is, Tresha took the pan home with her and brought it back morning of the wedding. My only instruction was that i wanted it to look like a big cupcake, and my "bride and groom" topper idea was to make cupcakes look like a bride and groom.

This is what she brought, and WE LOVED IT:

it was super yummy too! since we cut into this cake for the cake cutting ceremony, we saved the groom and bride cupcakes for our 1 year anniversary.

ETA I have since used this cupcake tree 7 MORE TIMES! read about that here