The Party: Cupcakes!

We had the Dum Ditty Drum cake at the party, but we needed some monkeys, too!
And, what flavor says monkeys like banana?

I used this recipe for the cupcakes, and this recipe for the Nutella icing.

Then I decorated the cupcakes to look like the monkeys who say, Dum Ditty Dum Ditty, Dum Dum Dum!

I used some Valentine's day M&Ms and sorted the whites and pinks. I used the pinks on the big cake and the whites for the eyes of the monkeys.
For the nose and mouth, I used a Nilla Wafer (yum!). I mixed a bit of milk with some gel food dye, and used a skinny paint brush to make the nostrils and a smile.
I read on one account of this (found on Pinterest of course), that the Nilla Wafers get soggy when applied to far in advance, so I waited till the morning of the party to apply them. They did get gross pretty quickly, but not so much soggy as stale.

Here's the finished product!

And here they all are, getting ready to be eaten!

We ended up with way more cupcakes than we needed, so we took them downstairs to the dining room of Nanna's nursing home. I tried to tell one woman what they were-- banana cupcakes with Nutella icing.  "Vanilla?" she said.
"No, Nutella. Um, it's a hazelnut spread. Chocolate and hazelnut."
"What did she say?" she asked the lady sitting next to her.
Generation gap, I guess.