Cupcake Ronald Reagan, or How I Spent My Summer Vacation

So yeah, I was that blogger. Just disappeared for 5 months! Well, to catch you up, my husband and I sold two condos and bought and moved to a house, we went on a vacation to the East Coast, and celebrated our son's first birthday. Also, I did some baking! I had a few special projects that I worked on during the blog hiatus, so I'll be posting those soon (promise!).

Anyway, onto the Cupcake Reagan. This was an ambitious undertaking that I pulled off in one muggy June afternoon. Looking back, I'm not sure how I accomplished that, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that my son was eight months at the time and much less mobile than he is now. This was baked for a fundraiser/party that had a Ronald Reagan theme, and was inspired by the cupcake mosaics of Barack Obama that appeared around election time last year. The portrait was made out of 100 cupcakes, all vanilla if I remember right, and was created by placing a grid over the Reagan logo that had been designed for the party T-shirts. Here is the original design (I did not design it, but the a lovely and talented friend did):


I took the top portion of the photo and cropped it until it was square, then placed a grid over the photo that divided it into 100 equal-sized squares. Once the cupcakes were baked and cooled, I simply followed the grid and piped star-dots on the cupcake that corresponded to the appropriate square on the picture grid. I used three colors of frosting: white vanilla, blue vanilla, and chocolate. Honestly, I had no idea if thistechnique was going to turn out, but it seemed to work! I only have the one picture of it and I didn't even take it. My whole place was covered in frosting and I was pretty frantic trying to get the whole thing finished in time for the party, so getting artistic shots wasn't high on my list. Luckily the decoration went smoothly and quickly, and the cupcakes were a hit, and a friend took a photo at the party:


This picture was taken from the loft overlooking the cupcake table, I believe. The cupcakes were placed in a 30x30 box that I built from foam core boards and white masking tape. Two layers on the bottom for extra support, because 100 cupcakes are not light. My husband and a friend had the lucky job of getting to transport it from our condo to the party, but they did good and everything made it there intact. Overall, this was a fun project, and I may attempt it again with someone else's face in the future.