If you’ve never decorated cakes with little kids, you should. Give them the tools and let them go nuts with creativity and they will both impress and amuse you. Give them instructional guidance when they request it, but for the most part, stand back and let them go with their own flow. Sometimes they’ll develop new techniques right before your eyes, doing something you always thought was “impossible”.

They’ll come up with elaborate narratives, crazy amounts of detail, and mind-blowing concepts. And with most of them, about three solid inches of icing if they can get away with it.

Our club has recently started a roving version of the kids’ decorating table we feature at our show every year, so if you know of an Austin-area event that would appreciate having a cupcake decorating table, let us know! Ideally we’d like to charge a buck a cupcake to raise funds for our club.

Here are some photos of our grand day at the Austin Family Music Festival:

Kyla, Leslie, and Gwen help some older kids create their masterpieces.

Kyla and Ellen smile at little boys enjoying piles of icing.

Poof! Cupcakes gone before I could turn the camera on!

An impressive pile of icing squiggles!

CUPCAAAAAAAAAKE!

We’re working on starting a Family Club soon, so if you’re interested, be sure to leave a comment letting us know. In the meantime, I just posted the cake my five-year-old (a member of Capital Confectioners!) made for her Daddy’s birthday and in the next few days will post the results of the classes I volunteered to teach some middle-schoolers. I find it endlessly rewarding to cake decorating with kids and I hope these joyous photos inspire you to give it a try if you haven’t already!

Plus remember that kids can enter cakes in our annual show for free! 12 and under all get a little reward, and 13-17 year olds compete for awesome prizes! So if you know a young decorator, be sure to encourage them to participate in the 2012 show. You’ll see a lot more posts about that as it gets closer. Stay tuned!