Birthday Cupcake Adventure

For my birthday I decided to experiment with cake decorating. I bought myself a few supplies and spent an afternoon in the kitchen. My goal was to make scrabble themed cupcakes, with scrabble tiles that spelled out 3 letter words, like fun, yum, etc. So I started out by making fondant using marshmallow. That was the stickiest mess I had ever made in my kitchen, but the fondant eventually took form and I stored in the fridge for a few days. Just in case the fondant didn't work for what I was trying to accomplish, I also bought some pre-made gumpaste, which is typically used for making edible flowers, etc. From my experience, the fondant is sweeter, and harder to work with, versus the gumpaste, which I found easier to work with, yet not as tasty and drier overall.

I originally was going to make white scrabble tiles, and black writing, so I rolled out the fondant and rolled out the gumpaste and let them sit. Then, I added coloring to the gumpaste. That was a hand workout, but it took on the color nicely. Then I broke out my white fondant pen and got used to the flow of the frosting after writing a couple words. I liked the fondant pen, but it was a little hard to stop to have crisp edges on the letters.
So with my scrabble tiles made I needed frosting for my cupcakes before I could shove those tiles on. I've used Wilton frosting dyes before, but I think this the first time I actually got the frosting to match the color that the label showed: teal; not baby blue, or lite blue, or on the verge of teal, but actually teal.
By the time I got the frosting made and frosted 1 cupcake I came back to the scrabble titles, and while the fondant ones were still okay, the ones made out of gumpaste were dry and cracking, despite covering them as suggested. So my plans changed a little. Instead of having fun 3 letter words on fake scrabble tiles, I frosted my cupcakes and used the fondant pen to write some short words that describe and/or relate to my life.
This was one big experiment, and perhaps I need to take a class, but in the end I got some yummy double chocolate cupcakes with blue, strawberry-flavored frosting The entire process was time consuming, but a whole lot of....