Chocolate Graduation Caps

Last weekend we celebrated son-in-law Lance's graduation at our place with a picnic on the patio.  Of course, there was a buffet full of all sorts of scrumptious foods.  You know, the kind of meal when you wish the provided paper plates were three times the size that they are, or that you had four hands to carry more.

We all know that the skill needed for these types of parties is an awareness of timing and quantity.  That is to say, one would not want to eat too fast or pack in so much so that one did not leave enough room for sampling each and every one of those items off to the side there on the dessert table.  On that table we had black bottomed cupcakes, snickerdoodle cookies, and chocolate graduation caps.

Today I share with you the simple crafty fun of putting together these cute chocolate goodies.

Gather up your ingredients:

miniature Reese's peanut butter cups
several bars of dark chocolate, broken into squares
icing
mini m & m's

Let's get started:

Start by unwrapping the miniature peanut butter cups.  Our cups were a bit soft and were sticking to the papers, so we put them into the freezer for 15 minutes and then had no trouble unwrapping them.

Position them as shown onto your serving platter.

Squirt a drop of icing on top of each cup.  This will act as "glue" to hold the cap top on.

Gently press a square of chocolate from the chocolate bars onto each cap.

The hole on the nozzle of our icing container was too large for creating the "tassels," so we put a bit of icing into a zip-loc baggie and cut a tiny hole down off the corner.  Perhaps if we had purchased a smaller tube of decorative icing we wouldn't have had to fuss with the baggie.  Use whatever works for you and create some tassels, starting at the center of each cap.

Finally stick one mini m & m onto the cap as its button.

A few notes and observations:  

If you don't want to buy those large candy bars and break them into squares, you could buy After Eight thin mints instead.  They are the perfect square size also.  

If we had been more detail oriented, we would have used only tassel icing in the exact school colors of Lance's college.  I have also seen these caps made using tassels cut from fruit roll-ups of the school colors and draped over the side.

I know it's currently not the typical graduation season, but I just ate the last leftover cap, and so I thought I'd share this cute dessert while it was still fresh in my mouth mind.  I think these would be fun for any graduation, from pre-school to college.

Enjoy!