Cup cakes are one of the cutest little things that it’s possible to make for yourself and any guests that might happen to come by your home. They’re delightful to have on a platter, especially since they’re so small that you can easily inhale three in no time at all!
The best way to decorate cupcakes in your own kitchen is to make a batch of simple icing, and then use that to top the cupcakes. The flavors of the icing are the most important part of the process, but you can create any number of beautiful patterns and motifs with even the simplest of tools and ingredients.
We’ve got some great ideas hidden away in our article, so take a look below to find some of our favorite ways to decorate cup cakes.
Buttercream Icing
Buttercream icing is easy to make and tasty to eat – the ideal blend for making in your own kitchen! On top of that, the icing takes a dye very well, meaning that you can easily customize cupcakes or even larger cakes to be perfect for the occasion you happen to be baking for.
- The ideal recipe to make a great buttercream is to have a two to one ratio (by weight) of icing sugar to butter. For example, you would cream together a hundred grams of icing sugar and fifty grams of butter. This will always result in a buttercream which is that perfect blend of dense and light!
- To this blend, you can add roughly a teaspoon of food coloring, food flavoring, or both! Of course, the amount of either of those ingredients that you might want to add depends upon how intense you want either of those things to be. For the intense red color, for example, you could add two teaspoons of red food coloring, or half a teaspoon of red food coloring paste – which naturally has an extremely strong color.
- One of the best things about buttercream icing is that it doesn’t need any additional flavorings. Of course, you can add in various flavor extracts, for example, vanilla, but the creamy flavor of the butter and icing sugar almost always works perfectly! Plus, the flavor is sufficiently neutral that it will complement the flavor of whatever cake you’re dressing with the icing.
- Decorating a cupcake with buttercream icing couldn’t be easier! The best way to go is to simply dollop a generous helping of buttercream on top of each cake, and then roughly press it to fit it across the surface of the cupcake. This will ensure a good covering, and you’ll have beautiful and elegant cakes in no time!
Messy Chocolate Icing
Now, the clue is in the name for this one: it is exceptionally messy. Despite that, though, it does look really visually striking! It’s a method of making a lot of mess while you also make your cakes truly pretty.
- To get started with this method, you must first select the chocolate (or blend of chocolate) that you’ll be using. We’d recommend beginning things with just milk chocolate – it melts predictably well and has an all-around great flavor.
- Then, melt your chocolate in a double-boiler, making sure not to get any water in with the chocolate. Adding water to chocolate will completely ruin the chemical structure of the chocolate, meaning that it will begin to clump, and will look particularly poor. As we will be using chocolate for decoration and not as an ingredient here, make sure to avoid adding any water to the mix whatsoever.
- While the chocolate is melting, densely pack your cupcakes onto a sheet of greaseproof baking paper. Whatever you do, make sure that there’s as little space between the cakes as possible – this will mean that you’ll make the best use of your chocolate.
- When the chocolate is melted, add it to a piping bag, and use a nozzle with a very fine, circular tip.
- Then, while maintaining constant pressure on the piping bag, drizzle the melted chocolate out across the cupcakes on the countertop. We would recommend swinging the bag back and forth in a motion perpendicular to yourself across the cupcakes at first, before switching direction to swinging parallel to yourself.
- After one or two passes with the chocolate bag, you will have covered them all. Move the cupcakes to the fridge to allow the chocolate to set, and dispose of the baking paper. You will be extremely thankful that you remembered to put it down!
Fondant Circles
This is another incredibly simple way to decorate cup cakes. It works particularly well because, if done right, it ensures that each person gets a consistent amount of fondant icing with each bite. This can be tough to accomplish, and will surely be noticed and appreciated by anyone who happens to eat more than one of your cupcakes.
- To make little fondant toppings for your cake, first, roll out a block of fondant icing in icing sugar to about a centimeter thick – this is the point at which you’ll be ensuring the evenness of the icing of your cupcakes, so take great care here.
- When the icing is the appropriate thickness, you can take a cookie-cutter that’s the same size as the tops of your cupcakes, and cut out shapes. These shapes will then easily lift off the countertop, allowing you to place them on the tops of your cakes!
- The fantastic thing about this method is that your options are nearly limitless. So many differently shaped cookie cutters are made that you can top your cupcakes with any shape of fondant icing that your heart desires! If you were having a birthday party, for example, for a small child with a fondness for dinosaurs, then you can easily go out and track down some small dinosaur cookie cutters!
A nice little trick to bear in mind, however, is that you can impress small patterns upon the surfaces of fondant icing by simply not pressing a cookie cutter all the way. For example, a nice choice could be to cut the icing down to a circle of precisely the right size, before pressing a flower into the center of those circles to complete the pretty design.
Butterfly Cakes
Butterfly cakes are a lot of people’s first baking memory with their parents or grandparents, and that means two things: people will always love the fond memories conjured up by eating them, and you likely know how to make them already.
To easily make your cupcakes into butterfly cakes, simply begin by making up a batch of plain cupcakes. Then, using a small knife, remove an inverted cone from the center of each cupcake.
Place the cone onto the counter, and cut it in half, creating your two ‘butterfly wings’. Then, you can fill the void you created with buttercream, and place the ‘wings’ into the icing. This will mean that you can create a beautifully simple cupcake easily and quickly. Ideal for making a tray for a party!
Conclusion
There are many other ways that you can learn to make cupcake decorations. However, sometimes it takes a bit of guidance and practice to make a perfect one. Cakeflix is one of my favorite sites to check out new ways to make cupcake decorations.
You may also be keen on 3 Ways You Can Use To Make Chocolate Curls For Cake Decoration.