Toy Story Cupcake Tree

My son is obsessed with Toy Story. Enough so that we had to do a Toy Story party for his 4th birthday. I’m saving the party planning details for a later blog post, but the cupcake tree I made deserves its own post.

To Four and Beyond!

And here is a closeup of some of the aliens to give you a better look:

I started by baking over 50 chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes following a recipe from Annie’s Eats. This recipe received rave reviews from guests. I highly recommend it! What’s nice about the recipe is that there is no egg in the cookie dough filling that goes in the center of the cupcake.

I used white Satin Ice fondant with vanilla buttercream flavor to make the decorations. I can’t stand the taste of fondant in general, but Satin Ice tastes the best out of all brands in my opinion. To make the aliens, I colored some of the fondant using Wilton’s Leaf Green gel. The eyes and face were cut using small circle cutters. The two ears on the side were done using small leaf cutters, and the antenna on the top was hand rolled. To make the aliens a little silly, I gave them different facial expressions.

Before I forget, I have to give props to my sister-in-law, Fareeda, for helping me make the fondant decorations. She has never worked with fondant before and did really well for her first time as you can see in the pictures! We also made some stars to represent Woody’s badge and put a #4 in the middle for my son’s age.

The most challenging part was making Andy’s bed. The top tier of my cupcake stand is 8 inches in diameter, so I baked a two layer 8-inch chocolate cake. Once cooled, I used leftover cookie dough filling from the cupcakes to fill my cake. After I stacked the two layers on an 8-inch cake board, I cut the cake into a rectangle roughly the dimensions of a twin bed. I frosted the cake using leftover brown sugar frosting from the cupcake recipe I mentioned above.

Curious how Andy’s bed was put together? Here is what I did:

• Quilt on Andy’s bed: Use Wilton’s Royal Blue color gel. Drape it on top of the cake and use a toothpick to cut diamonds in the quilt.
• Sheet on Andy’s bed: Use a white rectangular strip of white fondant.
• Andy’s Pillow Case: Take a graham cracker and fold white fondant around it. Presto pillow!
• Headboard and Footboard: Sketch and cut pieces out on a small piece of cardboard. Cover the front and back of each piece in brown fondant.
• Bed Posts (optional- I did not do this): Use pretzel rods, cut down to size, and cover in brown fondant.

And to make sure we didn’t forget any of my son’s other favorite Toy Story characters, we took his action figures and spread them around the cupcake tree!

How many Toy Story characters do you see?

Another look at the cupcake tree from different angles: