Mother's Day cupcake
What You Need: 1 cupcake; chocolate icing; shaved coconut tinted green; candy flowers (any kind).
How to Make It: Frost cupcake. Carefully position coconut grass in a dome shape so that what’s left (the brown background) is in the shape of a basket with handle. Add flowers and you’re done!
Jellybean flower cupcake
What You Need: 1 cupcake; white frosting; green frosting; 6 yellow (or any color) jellybeans; 1 orange (or any color) candy for center (I used a Runt); pastry bag and leaf tip, or tubed icing with leaf tip.
How to Make It: Frost cupcake white. Arrange 6 jellybeans around center candy to form flower shape. Add green leaves.
Flower cupcake with teardrop petals
The easiest cupcakes are probably those where all you have to do is arrange candy or other toppings on your cupcake. These flower cupcakes are simple enough for little kids, and there are plenty of variations for the center, petals and leaves; just use your imagination.
What You Need: 1 cupcake; frosting (any color, really); teardrop-shaped sweet/sour candies or other candies; Junior Mint or other round candy; green fruit lace or strip of fruit leather, or just use writing icing.
How to Make It: Place Junior Mint in center of cupcake and surround with candies to form petals. Add candy leaves and fruit lace stem.
Pink Candy Corn Flower Cupcake
What could be easier than arranging candy corn around a candy raspberry? (The hardest part might be finding the candies, but you can always substitute! Use another seasonal color of candy corn and put a gumdrop in the center instead.)
What You Need: 1 cupcake; white frosting; 6 pink candy corns (sold around Valentine’s Day and in candy shops); gummi red raspberry candy.
How to Make It: Place raspberry candy in center of cupcake. Surround with candy corn with the pointy ends pointing inward to form a flower shape.
cupcake flower with candy corn
What You Need: 1 cupcake; white frosting; 7 pastel candy corns; 1 pastel M&M.
How to Make It: Frost cupcake. Place M&M upside down in the center of the cupcake. Surround with candy corn, alternating colors, with the white tips facing inward toward the M&M center.
These sunflower cupcakes are minty fresh and easy-as-can-be.
What You Need: 1 cupcake; frosting (white or whatever you’d like); yellow mini mints (smooth and melty, the kind with white nonpareils on the flat side); chocolate sprinkles.
How to Make It: Frost cupcake white. Add yellow mints, arranged in two circles but leaving a space in the center. Sprinkle chocolate jimmies in the center, guiding them with your hand or a funnel.
You’ll need to break out the decorating tips for this cupcake, but making daisies is easy, I promise! You don’t even have to have a pastry bag and metal tips. Just buy a tube of white icing (Wilton and 
CakeMate makes them) and the plastic, four-tip set. One of those is a “rose” tip: wide at one end and thinner at the other.
What You Need: 1 cupcake; frosting tinted green; frosting tinted yellow; white frosting; pastry bag and metal tips #104 and #3, or prepackaged tube and tips. (I used royal icing, so my daisy is hard and crunchy. But you can use regular icing and make the daisy right on your cupcake.)
How to Make It: Frost cupcake green. Use round tip to draw trellis pattern (grid) on top of cupcake. Practice making daisies on waxed paper (you can reuse the icing) before making one directly on your cupcake. Hold bag or tube with tip #104 perpendicular or at a slight angle (daisies are very forgiving), with the wide end of the tip facing either directly away from you or directly toward you. Start about 1 1/2 inches out from what will be the center of your daisy, squeeze, and ease up on pressure as you pull tip toward center. Repeat around. Use #3 tip to pipe yellow center.
