Magical Sparkly Cupcakes

Posted on: April 19, 2010

Yeah, I totally used a box mix for these. I use cake box mixes all the time, because they are easy and delicious. And, when I do otherwise, it is because I’m using a box mix plus a “Cake Mix Doctor” cookbook recipe. Not that I haven’t made an occasional cake from scratch, but generally when I’m making a cake, I’m more interested in frosting-related tasks.

On a related note, I use store-bought frosting even less then I make cakes from scratch. This is because store-bought frosting tastes like it has been sitting on a shelf in a can for the past several months. Home-made frosting isn’t that hard to make, and is infinitely more delicious than store-bought frosting.

For these babies, I used this “Wedding Cake Frosting” recipe, plus some purple food coloring. I halved the recipe and still have about 1/2 of the frosting sitting in the fridge awaiting the next cake/cupcakes I make. It spread really evenly and I highly recommend it.

I call these cupcakes “nighttime cupcakes”, due to how their decorating came out. My baked good decoration skills are generally hit or miss. 1/3 of the time, things look amazing, 1/3 of the time, the decorating is average, and the other third of the time involves frosting on the ceiling and cat and me eating half of the project immediately out of frustration. Anyhow, I was pretty happy with these, partly because I remembered to use a super-easy way to decorate cupcakes. Frost them, and then roll the edges in sprinkles. The transparent blue sprinkles I used ended up looking really interesting with the purple shining through them. Adding stars to the top of these babies turned them into the sort of thing Care Bears probably gorge upon on a regular basis.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.