My First Themed Party Event!

I started preparing for this event 1 week ago and spent a total of 45+ hours of labor on this event as a whole.  I had many obstacles to overcome and learned a great deal in the process. For a first event, I must say it was a great success.  The customer ordered 18 King Size cupcakes, with fondant covering, ribbon wrapping, and a variety of gumpaste flower toppings. 
Last weekend I started preparing the gum-paste flowers. I spent 22 hours on them between Saturday and Sunday and completed them Mon-Wed evening (after getting home from my day job).  I made daisies, gerber daisies, peonies, roses, sunflowers, and calla lilies. The more elaborate flowers (peonies and gerber daisies) took me about 45 minutes to make.  I am completely self taught in making gum-paste flowers, with much help from youtube tutorials and website directions.  I can't believe how much information is out there and at your fingertips.  I have learned such a great deal and I think my flowers are truly exceptional for such a beginner. 
On Wednesday I made the marshmallow fondant and colored it several bright colors - yellow, lime green, teal, electric pink, electric purple, and orange.  Again, I learned to make MM fondant from youtube tutorials and have made it numerous times already - each time I am able to make it better and better.  Practice makes perfect for sure.
Finally Friday evening I started on the j'adore raspberry cupcakes.  I made them in Wilton's King Size cupcake pan.  The cupcake consists of a raspberry puree and raspberry chunks. I used fresh raspberries, of course, and pureed them in my food processor and strained the seeds out through my sieve.  The cupcakes took about 30 minutes to bake due to the large size of them.  I had to make the batter 3 times to make all 18 cupcakes - I only have 1 kitchen aid mixer that holds a batter for about 2 dozen standard cupcakes (the king size is about 2 1/2 times a standard).  Once cooled, I scooped out the centers and filled them with raspberry ganache (made with raspberry puree, heavy cream, and bittersweet chocolate). I topped the cupcakes with white chocolate buttercream (made with melted white chocolate, heavy cream, butter, and powdered sugar).  I smoothed out the buttercream on each cupcake and put them in the fridge to chill a few hours (this was 3am Saturday morning). time for bed!
Woke up at 6am to top the chilled cupcakes with the marshmallow fondant and this took about two hours. Next I needed to tie a ribbon around the cupcake.  The reason being is that Wilton king size cupcake liners only come in white and my customer wanted to hide the liner because the cupcake showed through the liner and was not to her liking, nor mine for that matter! I needed to wrap the cupcakes with ribbon to hide them.  The challenge was for the ribbon to stay up on the cupcake - since the cupcake gets wider as it gets taller, the ribbon wanted to keep sliding down the cupcake.  I tried double stick tape but that wouldn't work and I even tried industrial carpet tape- they would adhere to the ribbon just fine but would not stick to the bakes cupcake liner - due to all the ridges from the cup.  So the solution was to wrap the ribbon twice around and tie it up at that point - simple enough but a last resort because I ended up having to just make a knotted tie rather than a looped bow but I think the end result was adorable and I didn't have to use any yucky tape on it.
So now it is about 10:30 am and time to load the car and be on our way.  Another challenge was how to transport these cupcakes. Because they are so tall and so wide on top, they would not stay stable in a standard cupcake lined box and they would brush against eachother when placed side be side. So the solution was to make the insert holes bigger and staple the liner half way up the box and to place the cupcakes in every other hole. Only thing is the box had to remain open, again because the cupcakes were so tall, they would get squished by the box top. 

I opted to adhere the gum-paste flowers on to the fondant topped cupcakes once I arrived at the location. The flowers are so delicate that one bump in the road and they could have topples off the cupcake.  This solution was for the best.  I arrived at the location with plenty of time to dress up all the cupcakes. I adhered the flowers to the cupcakes with a solution of equal parts meringue powder and water - another tid bid I picked up from a cake decorating forum.  The result was fantastic and I was so thrilled with it.  I think the customer was as well. 
This job was so challenging, stressful, and exhausting but the end result was more than worth it.