Sea Turtle cupcakes

Two days off, and this what happens. I make two dozen (plus three that I "tasted")  sea turtle cupcakes for a work event. I hope these kiddies like this party favor. They were more time consuming than I realized. Thank goodness, I had this time off! I got the idea from here: http://family.go.com/food/recipe-852443-squirt-happy-turtlecakes-t/ and the originals look like this.

These are obviously the most perfect three out of like, six dozen, but hey, handmade has a certain quality, eh?

Here are some tips of what I found to be helpful:
-Get a sharp knife to cut the candies into pieces. You must use wintergreen slices, which are pretty hard to find at Target. CVS or Walgreens seemed to always have them. It was pretty hard to find only green or only red gumdrops, so I bought several bags of assorted, and picked out the colors. I ended up wasting more candy than anyone could eat.
-Stick a toothpick or skewer in the side of the gummy drop head and dip the point of the mini chocolate chip in white frosting. Stick the pointy part of the chip into the hole so it stays in place, and press the flat side so it goes in. The frosting "white" of the eye tends to get messy, so wipe around it.
-Not sure why, but I made Angel Food cupcakes. The candy is too top heavy for angel food, so make a real cupcake!
-Since I made these ahead of time due to my work schedule, I froze them, which moistened the sugar on the candy too much.

Update: the kids loved them, although they left blue haired. Ooops. Looking back on it, I probably wouldn't have used conventional food coloring. White frosting looks fine, but if you like color, here is a link for natural blue food coloring via Whole New Mom. The color won't be a vivid blue, but really, that blue looks too artificial to eat.