Travis's Birthday/Return from the Jungles of Indonesia

When Travis finally returned from spending four weeks in the jungle in Indonesia, working on biological conservation and other such stuff, it also happened to be his birthday, so we decided to throw him a joint "you survived" and "happy birthday" party.  To go along with the theme of being in the jungle, I, with the help of Travis's girlfriend, decided to make some cupcakes with insects on them to remind him of the jungle and how he survived by not getting malaria, which was my idea of what was going to happen to him.

We used some tracings from my cupcake book to start out with some insect shapes.

Next, we piped melting chocolate into the shapes that we traced on some wax paper.  We also added our own mosquito design to go with the malaria theme.

After the chocolate was piped on, we added candy pieces to make the insects' bodies.  I would recommend putting more chocolate than just a trace, because even after being in the fridge for a while, the insects were easy to break when removing them from the wax paper.

To continue the malaria theme, we got some jam and injected into the cupcakes that we were going to put the mosquitoes on.  I saw the large needle at the grocery store a while ago and I was planning on making something with cream filling, but this came first, and it worked well.

It was kind of hard to inject jam, because it is so thick, but it worked well.  I injected in two spots close to the middle to disperse the jam.

Here's the final cupcakes from above.  All the mosquitoes had jam filled cupcakes and we made pinkish frosting for Travis's pasty white skin with black licorice hairs on them.  The rest of the insects were put on a green background.  Also, we made some cupcakes into spiders by making chocolate mandibles that look like mustaches with licorice legs sticking out the sides.

We also added some written cupcakes.  These ones say "I'm not dead yet," "welcome home," and "you survived"

Close up part two.  Also "the boy who lived" which Travis seemed to appreciate the most.

Last close up of the cupcakes.  Also including "happy b-day"

And for those of you who were curious, this is what the jam filled cupcakes looked like.  I didn't get to try one, because Travis took all of them home with him, but from the people who did get one, they said that it tasted really good, which makes me want to do some more flavor experiments.