M&M Cupcakes

My manager asked me to make cupcakes for her daughter's 1st birthday.  Her initials are M.M. so my manager asked me to make M&M cupcakes.  I browsed a few pictures on the internet and tried to see how I could go about all of this and I found that the best way would be to make the M&M characters out of fondant and just place them on top.

I started out with red, yellow, blue, and green fondant and cut out 24 circles, 6 of each color, and about 2 inches in diameter.  I found that the most difficult part would be creating the smiles.  I didn't want to just cut out smiles because one, it would be so time consuming given that I would have to cut out each one with a knife, and two, there wouldn't be any dimension to the lips.  As you can see, using my expert paring skills, I tried cutting them out with a knife, and then just used some tools to soften the edges to make them pop out the slightest bit.

After all of the smiles were done, I cut out half circles and adhered them to the back so it would show beneath as the mouth.  I had to be resourceful because I didn't have many cutters, so I used a "0" from my alphabet fondant cutters for the eyes.  For the eyebrows, I used the "!" and bent them a little bit to form the eyebrows.  Crafty, I know.

Onto the eyes, I hand cut all of the eyelids.  I was NOT very happy with two of the green M&Ms, and I'm pretty sure you can tell which two.  Their eyes are inverted a little bit, which made shaping the eyelids very difficult.  They look troubled, and I couldn't fix it because I had already attached the white circles.  I used the inner portion of the "P" to form the black parts of the eyes.

Finally, I made some easy royal icing and piped on the "M"s.  You can't tell now, well not really at least, but I used some icing to fill in a glare on the eyes.  It really made the eyes pop out more, a huge difference, I thought.

Anyway, my manager asked for vanilla and chocolate cake with rainbow chip icing.  I DID NOT MAKE THE ICING, too hard and I was short on time. :X I finally piped on the icing, and waited til the absolute last minute to assemble everything because I wanted to keep the cupcakes as moist as possible in an airtight container.  They were devoured at the party and I couldn't have been more happy. :)  Thanks for reading!

Oh and this was her little smash cake. Nothing ridiculous.