I have volunteered to work in a booth for our local center to prevent child abuse event. I thought it would be fun to have the kids decorate either mini cupcakes or cookies. Which one do you think would work the best? Has anyone done anything like this? I would appreciate any ideas on how to make this work as smoothly as possible.TIA

I think to help reduce the mess (there WILL still be a mess, but maybe a smaller one ), I would do the mini cupcakes and have out bags of frosting...maybe different colors with star tips, which I'd tie off to keep icing from pouring out the back. I'd also have bowls of toppings like sprinkles, mini choc. chips, mini m&m's...things like that. The each child could pipe a swirl of icing and stick on some toppings. I think it'd be easier and cleaner than plastic knives to spread icing onto cookies. JMHO
HTH

I've done it several times with the kids' classes and scouts. If you bake cookies , you can cover them in fondant. (much less time consuming than icing them with R.I. . Then, I would make batches of royal in about 5-6 different colors and put them in squeeze bottles. They sell tham at any craft store. Then they can decorate the blank cookies any way they want. What I've also done is pre-made little flowers...just cut them from fondant and they can "glue" them on the cookies.

Kids absolutely LOVE doing this!

I was thinking the same thing for our school fundraising event next month. Make cupcakes and take bags of a few colors of icing bags wtih star tips with me, with some sprinkles and premade flowers ,stars etc of gumpaste/fondant mix.

To refill the bags, I am planning to make icining tubes, like the one in the thread:
http://www.cakecentral.com/cake-decorating-ftopict-38404.html

only, I will tie them on both sides, so when the icing bag is empty, just take out a tube, cut the end and pop it in the bag. Hopefully, this should reduce the mess.

This is my first time doing this kind of thing, so I am hoping all goes well.
So I will be watching this post for more idea. Thanks for posting.

I haven't done anything on a mass scale but I often decorate cupcakes or cookies with my children aged 1 and 2 - they find cookies easier. I just put the royal icing on and then they go mad with sprinkles and lollies. It can also be really easy to just buy a pack of plain sweet biscuits (we use Milk Arrowroots) so you don't have to do heaps of cooking.

The only thing similar that I have done was my daughter's 10th bday. I made 8 4" cakes (I would do cupcakes next time, more cost effective ). Then I had 10 different disposable piping bags filled with frosting & tinted different colours. I used different tips so they could get different effects. I also had different coloured sugar and sprinkles they could use. This was there "loot bag" take home gift.
& btw: that is a great thing to do (volunteer your time) for such an event.