Ruffled Cupcakes

Well, hello there! Fancy meeting me here, right? I’m sorry it has been so long! A lovely Australian company was holding my domain name hostage for a few weeks, and that was followed by several insanely busy weeks at work.

Meanwhile, Sprinkle Bakes posted a seriously beautiful collection of cupcake piping techniques, and I tried my hand at one when my friend Lisa came to visit! (Skip video to 2:05 to go directly to the ruffle technique, but I highly recommend watching the other techniques, as well!)

I love how cute these cupcakes turned out (even if not as gorgeous as Heather’s)! I didn’t have exactly the right tip (#104), and I chose to use leftover cream cheese frosting rather than buttercream. I don’t know about buttercream (I don’t love it, so it’s quite possible that I’ve never used it), but cream cheese frosting is SO finicky about temperature. Too cold = too hard and crackly, but too warm = shiny, gooey mess. And guess what I ran into while frosting on a 95 degree day?

So, my ruffles were a little soft around the edges — but they were obviously ruffles! (Except for the last two. The last two were blobs, with a hint of ruffling on the edge.) Hopefully the abundance of colorful sprinkles in the cake batter was enough to distract from a little melting!

In addition to the ruffled frosting, I wanted try my hand at making Funfetti from scratch (at least partially motivated by the fact that I had 5 different kinds of cake mix in my pantry and Funfetti wasn’t one of them). Honestly, though, just buy the cake mix. The sprinkles sank to the bottom, and the cake just wasn’t that interesting. Who wants to make something from scratch that tastes less good than the $1.50 version?

Moral of the story? Buy Funfetti cake mix + a #104 petal icing tip and make some seriously cute cupcakes! Oh, and don’t register your domain through Melbourne IT.