Cupcake Decorating

Hello!

I had a lot of people email me and a few who left comments with some questions about how I did the cupcake decorating on this post here. Thank you so much for your interest and kind comments and emails!

So...I thought I'd do a post about how I did it. Most of the questions were about the colors used and which tips I used. I wanted pastel colors so I used gel food coloring that you can buy at the grocery store. I used Betty Crocker gel food colors and it comes in a box of 4 tubes. The colors included are red, yellow, blue and green. With this type of food coloring, you generally don't get the bright colors that are pictured on the box. They're usually always a softer version of the bright hues. The less you use, the softer, more pastel the shade is. This is exactly what I wanted so I just used a small squirt of the gel to achieve the desired pastel color. I used each color as it was in the tube. You could definitely experiment and mix colors if you wanted to.

(Just a note, if you're looking for brighter, bolder colors for your icing, I have found the Wilton concentrated gels work well for that. You can find those at most craft stores in the cake decorating aisle and some Walmart stores carry them too in the craft section.)

Anyway, I have a really YUMMY vanilla buttercream frosting recipe that I use. Just stir in the food coloring and be sure to mix really well. You don't want any white streaks through your frosting. Okay, now for the fun part. As soon as I finished making the icing, I divided the plain white icing into four separate bowls and made up four different colors. Then, to decorate I just used plastic ziploc baggies for piping bags. They're much cheaper than cake decorating bags and you get the exact same results. Snip a tiny piece of the corner off of each bag with some scissors. Place your cake decorating tip inside the bag where you just cut the small opening. Now, you can fill your bag with the desired icing color and decorate to your hearts content! I used 3 Wilton tips - #12, #21 and #2. #12 is a wide circular opening, I used it for the smooth swirls. #21 is a star shaped point that I used for the more textured swirls and #2 is a tiny circular opening that I used for the polka dots. Everything that I used is pictured above for easy reference. I hope this helps and answers all of your questions! I was going to include the vanilla buttercream frosting recipe in this post too but I hear the baby waking so I will have to put it in another post. Hopefully I will get it posted today! Have a wonderful day and happy baking!!

xo, Erin