Constellation cupcakes

It was my brother-in-law's birthday a couple of weeks ago, but for various reasons, his birthday celebration was postponed until last night.  One of his passions is astronomy, and he's very good at setting up his telescope to gaze at the stars, so I incorporated this into his birthday cake (well, cakes, actually!)

Each of the blue cakes has a contellation of stars piped onto it in white - there's Orion, Gemini, Cassiopeia, the Crux (Southern Cross), Scorpius, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Taurus, Pisces, Leo and Sagittarius.

The cupcakes are made from a Red Velvet mix from Suzie Q (which, honestly, was not what I expected - they were very nice, but from my experience, red velvet cake is red and slightly chocolate flavoured.  These were not very red - much more brown from the chocolate - and they had a raspberry flavouring in them!)  I made cream cheese frosting and coloured half of it blue (VERY blue - people ended up looking like blue tongued lizards!  For those of you not in Australia, yes, there is such a thing as a blue tongued lizard!  http://www.itsnature.org/ground/reptiles-land/blue-tongued-lizard/ ) I sprinkled some edible glitter onto all of the cakes (which looked very effective under the downlights in my sister and brother-on-law's kitchen!) On the white ones, I added some sugar cachoux, and I piped stars onto the blue ones, in the shapes of some constellations :)

 And here's Paul pointing out which is which!  ("That's Orion!")

Giving credit where credit is due, the idea came from
 http://helpinglittlehands.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/easy-constellation-cupcakes-space-party.html
and 
http://pinterest.com/pin/189643834278549832/