Easter with the ShepAlders

My family already celebrated Easter without us (for various reasons that I will, hopefully, be able to explain later... unless you've seen me in person, in which case I've probably already blah blah blahed about it). So I missed out on the egg hunt and the infamous lamb cake (a cake that looks like a lamb, not a cake made from lamb). Instead, when Josh and I went down to Eugene for the weekend, my mom and I made duck cupcakes.

They were supposed to look like this:

Hold on to your suspense!

We started off with cupcakes:

After we frosted the naked cupcakes for a base, we then added marshmallows cut in half crosswise for the tails and doughnut holes for the heads:

We were supposed to dip each cupcake in frosting, but the heads kept falling off. Instead, we did this:

It kind of worked, except the frosting at that point was so runny (for the dipping), it kept dripping off. I also used starburst for the beaks and feet:

 This required me to spent an hour squishing and molding. There was much debate about how best to do the feet. I think they turned out okay.

 We did finally get it all together, get the beaks on, and tried to keep the heads on. The turned out like this:

I think these duck bums are the cutest:

They are kind of deformed, but they just look so hopeful:

The unfortunate thing is that it took so much frosting to make everything stick together. It was a little too much sugar for me:

But people still ate and enjoyed them, so it was a success! 

 In Other News:
Remember how my dad requested we visit the Lego store in Chicago to buy odds and ends for his Lego projects? One of those projects is a Lego version of their house:

Isn't this ridiculous? 

My dad was planning to make it so you can take off the roof, but the design didn't work so well. So you miss that inside the house is all relatively (as close as you can get with Legos) architecturally accurate. There are even minifigs for most of the members of my family. For some reason, we're all in the den eating turkey.

Here's the back side: