WE LOVE A CANDY CHALLENGE
Wow, the All Candy Expo. Even the name makes you dream of Chocolate Bar Heaven. And it was not a disappointment...sort of like a walk in Willie Wonka land. Imagine huge colorful signs with pictures of mouth-watering candies and gigantic blow-ups of candies and cartoons everywhere and one insescapable smell...sugar. This was our challenge, cupcaking meets it's inspiration, candy. We set up a school room to teach folks the Hello, Cupcake! way to decorate cupcakes using candies from all of the candy companies at All Candy Expo. Bring it on. Our friends from M&Ms, Hershey, Jelly Belly, Tootsie Roll, Spangler, Farley's and Sather's, Ghiradelli. Ferrer Rocher, Bachman, and Ferrara Pan provided us with candy and we provided them with cupcakes extraordinaire. From Hershey we made Owls and Acorns using Kisses and Reeses Pieces, from Mars we made fish and flowers using M&Ms, with Tootsie Roll we rolled out the fabulous slumber party babies using Tootsie Fruit Chews for blankets, with Jelly Belly we made a veritabe garden with jelly bean flowers in an amazing array of gourmet flavors, Spangler inspired us to create a new cupcake critter using the Dum Dum pops for eyes, for Ferrara Pan we made Clowns and Ballons with Lemonheads and Boston Baked Beans, and Farley's and Sather's gave us the ingredients we needed for rolling and shaping tasty spice drops to make roses and fabulous flowers. I think the most popular by a landslide was a project using Ferrer Rocher hazlenut candies and Ghiradelli white chocolate. A little thing we like to call pasta night out...spaghetti and meatballs with hazlenut candy for meatballs and white chocolate for parmesan cheese. The easy to squeeze Duncan Hines frosting in a zip lock bag was used to make the spaghetti and the marinara sauce was strawberry preserves. All Candy Expo was so much fun we can't wait till the next one. Hope to see you there.

Here is our booth set up like art class with crafting supplies.

We went through a lot of Duncan Hines frosting in 3 days, those are empties in front of us.

We set up the tables with Fiskars and craft caddies to make it feel like school.

Here Karen turned our Oreo owl from the book into a Hershey owl for the Expo, viva la change!



Jennifer of That's So Sweet came by and made a rock star cupcake.


Funny Dum Dum critters made by our friends from Spangler.


Jim and Andrew from Jelly Belly making our signature Corn on the cob cupcakes with Jelly Belly gourmet jelly beans.

This is Karen loosing her mind after cupcake number 600!


And finally that's Karen's dear college friend, Maureen, in the middle. Maureen drove all the way to Chicago to lend a hand at our booth. She kept us organized, kept us creative, and kept us going for three long days of cupcaking. She even grabbed an offset spatula and started showing folks how they decorate a cupcake in Wisconsin. Thanks Maureen, you are the best.

Hope to see you next year at the All Candy Expo.
Alan and Karen