A friend of mine asked me to make some baby shower cupcakes for her brother and sister-in-law and these were the cute cupcakes I came up with. They aren’t super original, but they were fun to make and easy to decorate.

If I had had time to experiment, I would have liked to try making fondant rubber duckies, but with only a couple of days to plan and make these babies, mini rubber ducky toys were the way to go. It also kept the cost down since fondant can be a little pricey.

The cupcakes are spice cupcakes that I made using this recipe. The recipe instructs you to mix the ingredients together strangely, so by the suggestion from several of the comments, I mixed the butter and brown sugar together before adding the rest of the wet ingredients to it and mixed the dry ingredients separately. Then I added the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients a little bit at a time until it was all combined. The batter will be very thick.

The cupcakes turned out very dense, almost like a muffin but still light like cake. The only thing I’d change to this recipe would be to add more spices! It looked like there would be plenty of spices in it from reading the ingredients, but they didn’t end up as spicy as I wanted them to be. Overall, I liked them, especially warmed up. Warming them did something to the cupcakes that made them very moist and brought out the spice flavor better. Frankly, the cake is so good on its own, it doesn’t need frosting.

If you do want to add frosting, use a cream cheese frosting. I was asked to keep the frosting light for these cupcakes so I tried using Neufchatel cheese instead of cream cheese because it has less fat and calories, but it never got stiff.  Only use this type of cheese for this frosting if you don’t mind it being a little soupy. Otherwise, stick to regular cream cheese. A quick recipe for the frosting is below.

To decorate your cupcakes, find items that go with the theme of your baby shower. There are plenty of ideas out there. I chose to get “It’s a boy!” cupcake picks but these could easily be homemade too. Making them by hand adds a little personal flair to the cupcakes.

If you’d rather go the easy route, and top the cupcakes with little toys instead of fondant figurines, check out party stores or craft stores for cute items. I found these mini duckies in the toy and party favor section of Party City. Sometimes baby shower trinkets can be found at stores like Michaels as well. Make sure to clean the toys well before sticking them on to food that will be eaten.

For extra pizazz, sprinkle the tops of the cupcakes with sanding sugar, sprinkles and/or candy pearls.