Easter Cupcakes
Level: Easy
Time: Active: 1 hour Total time including baking and cooling cupcakes: 3 hours
Price: Under $10
Yay! We love cupcakes! And any excuse to try out new ideas is a good one. We're gearing up for Easter with these tasty treats.
What you'll need:
Cupcakes, baked and cooled for frosting.
White Frosting
Food coloring
Sandwich baggie (or pastry bag)
Mini Marshmellows
Cadbury mini eggs (or something similar resembing eggs)
Peeps
First you need to bake and then cool a batch of cupcakes.
Then, you will need to color the frosting. Spoon some frosting into a bowl (unless you know you're going to need a full container of frosting the same color, then just add coloring directly into the frosting container) and add a few drops of the desired color into the frosting. I used 3 drops for 1/4 of a container of frosting, but you may add more coloring to intensify your color.
Mix together the food coloring and frosting until you feel you have the color you like, then spoon the frosting into a corner of the sandwich baggie (or directly into a pastry bag). Once you have the frosting towards the tip of the bag, cut off just the tip of the baggy. The larger the cut, the larger the opening will be and more frosting will flow when pressure is applied to the bag.
You can either test the flow of frosting on a test cupcake, or test by starting to cover the cupcakes you will be using.
I used two methods to create "grass" looking frosting, "Pull Up" and "Squiggle", and as their names suggest, the action used is how I named them.
First, the Pull Up method. Keep steady pressure on the bag and pull up from the cupcake and back down to the surface to create the points and random pattern.
For the Squiggle method, again keep steady pressure on the bag of frosting but just hold the tip of the bag close to the cupcake and made quick back and forth squiggle motions to create a more stylized "grass" as seen below.
Now for the candy decorating! You can simply add Cadbury (or similar) candy eggs to the grass as shown below:
Or take more time and make a hidden basket of goodies topped with a Peep! To do so, take a cupcake and create a hole in the top by spooning out a portion of the cupcake, making sure not to dig too close to the bottom or sides.
Then fill the hole with sprinkles, Cadbury mini eggs or the like.
Frost the edge with green frosting and grab a Peep to cover up the opening!
The Peep should end up hiding the hole like this:
Perfect! Now, I didn't want all the delicious pink peep sugar in the container going to waste, so I decided to make a marshmellow flower! To do this, start by cutting mini marshmellows in half, diagonally, to create the petals.
The inside of the marshmellow will be sticky, so put those sides face down in the pink sugar.
Now, take these petals and start to create a flower by arranging them in a circle around a mini marshmellow in the center of the cupcake.
Add the next level of petals, sticky side up and this time not sugared, to create a contrast in the flower.
A squiggle of frosting around the center will allow for the final layer of petals to create your 3-D flower. I added just a pinch of the pink sugar to the center to tie it all together.
So there you have it. Three fairly simple ways to create fun and TASTY cupcakes for Easter or Spring! Hope you enjoyed the tutorial. Leave us a comment with a picture of your yummy creations!
