Pixar's Up Inspired Cupcake Display Tutorial

 I have discovered a brand new skill of mine. It's called forgetting my camera whenever I make the most elaborate of cupcake displays! No joke, it keeps happening lately. However with modern technology, I can at least snap a picture with my handy phone camera. 

My latest display was for an Up themed Young Women's New Beginnings program. Isn't it cute!? I thought about color coordinating the frosting with the liners but then I would have needed to make more frosting and have too much left over. In case you don't see it, the cupcakes are supposed to be like the balloons holding up the house. Maybe because I didn't color the frosting they also act as clouds. It would have looked really awesome if it were in front of a blue backdrop with clouds.

I didn't really take pictures while making this, but if you were interested in making something similar here are some of the details.

What you need:

• 2 cardboard boxes
• 3 box tops shaped like the one in the picture below (a good excuse to buy and eat the contents)You only need the half above the black line from 3 and one of the bottom halves.

• glue gun and lots of glue sticks
• clear plastic cups, at least 1 per cupcake (the exact size of the cup doesn't matter as long as a cupcake can fit into the bottom of it)
• various colored card stock paper to decorate the house ( I cut one inch strips from 12x12 paper for the paneling and using an 2 inch circle cutter cut a bunch of circles for the roof and yellow paneling, but cut the circles in half before attaching).

Not needed but super helpful:

• paper cutter
• 2 inch circle cutter
• some good music, a movie, or even better an awesome audio book to entertain you while your hands are busy. ( I recommend Divergent by Veronica Roth, I prefer listening to an audio book because unlike with a movie you don't have to look away from the project at hand at all!) 

 Building the house: 

• The main base of the house is just a box. 

• Cut out one of the  longer flaps to be used as the big roof
• Take your 3 box tops and glue to the edge of the top of the box like so,
  where the purple circles are.
• Glue the flap to the box tops. Now your house has a roof!
• From one of the almond roca box bottoms cut the following shapes out. glue piece a to section b. Add a roof (for more detailed instructions on how to make a roof read further below)

• Decorate and glue this to your house roof (the flap).
• Decorate as desired and then set aside

• cut second cardboard box to something that looks like the above shape to be folded on the dotted lines. Be sure that the spot where the rectangle starts to turn into a triangle (I hope that makes some kind of sense) is a few inches taller than the height of box 1
• measure the total length of the roof from the piece you just cut (length 1+length 2= total length of roof). Cut a piece of cardboard that long, fold in half, and attach with glue for your roof. *use these same instructions to make the roof for your almond roca window
• decorate as desired and then attach to front of decorated box 1

Semi vague instructions on adding cupcake holders that I hope you can understand:

•  cut the bases of the cups off (see image 1). I like to call the cup bases "cupcake holders" because they will hold your cupcakes. Cut an equal amount of the bases to cupcakes you will be adding.

image 1

cut 2 strips using the middle of the cup and  roll and tape into two tubes (see image 2). You won't need to do this step for each cup, only as many as you will be using to create "perches" for the cupcake holders.

image 2

Here's where my instructions get a little vague because I'm not sure exactly how to explain it.

• glue cupcake holders at various heights to your roof. Just be sure that the cupcake holders are level. That's what the tube perches are for. Also be sure that cupcakes and cupcake holders won't run into each other once the cupcakes are put into the cupcake holders.
• If I could do it again, I'd use small boxes wrapped in cloud paper to add various heights behind the houses roof flap instead of other cups, it would just give it a cleaner look.

There you have it! I hope at least some of that made sense, it'd probably be way easier to explain in a video, but I'm camera shy. Feel free to ask questions and I'll answer them as best as I can.