(WARRENSBURG, Mo.) – I made a chocolate cupcake with red icing, chocolate chips with a Reese’s cup in the middle Saturday night at The Mules After Dark sponsored Cupcake Wars event in the Elliott Student Union.

The event was a competition to see who could make the best cupcake that were then judged based on creativity and uniqueness. I didn’t enter mine into the contest though, I just ate it.

The cupcakes had three design themes: under the sea, winter wonderland or make your own. Winners won baking gift sets that included pans, cookies and cooking utensils.

I walked around and took a look at other people’s cupcakes. MAD supplied a lot of different toppings for the cupcakes, varying colors of icing, M&M’s, gummy worms, marshmallows, sprinkles, Reese’s cups and Hershey’s Kisses were just some.

One cupcake looked like a beach with yellow icing as the sand, blue icing as the ocean and a white line as the foam, separating the sand from the sea. There was a toothpick in the “sand” portion with a Reese’s cup wrapper on it like an umbrella and a red square with white lines for a beach towel.

Another cupcake was winter wonderland-themed with white icing as the snow. The icing was piled up to make a snowman with black icing for the details of the face and a Reese’s cup on his head for a hat. There was also a Christmas tree next to the snowman with green icing, white for the ribbons and M&M’s for the ornaments. The two winning cupcakes were the beach-themed cupcake and an under the sea-themed cupcake with an octopus on it made out of pink icing.

MAD also had games where contestants could earn raffle tickets for mini prizes after the cupcake decorating contest. The raffles earned during games were then put into a drawing.

Prizes for the games included food and snack sets, a pancake set with a mixing bowl and syrup, a Monopoly board game, a movie and popcorn set and a bathtub gift set with soap, body wash and Germ-X.

They had different games to play for raffle tickets. There was another called “Pin the Cherry on the Cupcake” where you had to close your eyes and put a paper cherry on top of the paper cupcake taped on the wall and a game where you had to throw darts at balloons on a dart board to try to pop them.

I played a balloon game where balloons were tied to a dart board, and I had to throw the darts to pop them. I played twice – only popping two. I didn’t win the raffle when they drew names, but the prizes weren’t things I was interested in so I can’t complain too much.

Cupcake Wars was a lot of fun. I liked seeing all the different cupcakes and playing games for the raffle tickets. The next time you want to have fun and eat a sweet treat, I recommend looking into MAD’s  Cupcake Wars!