A Rapunzel Cupcake Tower

A friend recently asked me for the details on the Rapunzel cupcake tower I made for Julia's 4th birthday Tangled bash.   So here we go...

I began by creating a base for the tower, which I constructed out of styrofoam and a wood dowel. A word of advice... hot glue and styrofoam DO NOT mix... waiting for craft glue to dry is a bore, but works so much better.  After the glue dried, I simply covered the base with green scrapbook paper.

While waiting for the glue to dry, I whipped up my favorite vanilla cupcake mix and baked eight cupcakes without liners in a standard muffin pan.  While the cupcakes cooled, I put the finishing touches on the tower base.

Once the cupcakes cooled, I stacked them in an alternating pattern of top to top... bottom to bottom...

 I then decorated the tower with green frosting ivy and an inverted ice cream sugar cone coated in purple chocolate to finish it off.

A Tangled Party

Julia's 5th birthday is quickly approaching and an Alice and Wonderland themed party is in the making. But, that's for later. Unfortunately right now I need to figure out how to make her next birthday as memorable for her as last year's. She continuously reminds me that her Rapunzel party was "The BEST birthday EVER!"

We started with the invitations!

After seeing really cute Rapunzel tower invitations from supermommoments.com, I knew we had to make invitations with long Rapunzel braids. After creating the invitation in Photoshop, I had them printed as 4 X 8 photos.  With some golden embroidery floss and super skinny purple ribbon, the braids were whipped up in no time!  A small slit made with an x-acto knife... pull the braid through... a little glue... and voilà! 

Next up, was a full-size version of Rapunzel braid from the invitation.  This took a bit more time to create, but I just threw in a movie on a Saturday night (how fun my Saturday nights are as a mom!) and fashioned this super cool braid.  I wish I had taken some pictures of the process. It entailed marching around two support poles in my basement to wrap the yarn around and around and around and around and around until I had enough to make a braid.

Next we found this template from Disney to make these adorable Pascal party blowers.

Of course we needed to continue our theme and incorporate it into dessert.

I found these cupcake liners at Michaels and thought they were perfect!  They reminded me of the purple flag bunting from the movie, but also had the shape of the lanterns...

We also created a dessert tower for Rupunzel out of cupcakes (directions here)!  

For the favors for the girls, I found this great tutorial on Do It Yourself Parties Blog for these adorable mini tiaras with attached braids....

... which I bagged and tied with personalized frying pan name tags (template from supermommoments)!

For the boys... Flynn Rider swords with personalized Wanted Poster name tags!

Julia's favorite part of her birthday...

Well okay, that was not it!

Julia's favorite part... releasing a sky lantern, just like the lanterns released by the kingdom every year on Rapunzel's birthday!