Tie-Die Cupcakes

These cupcakes turned out sooooo well!  I'm honestly kind of in love with them and I would love another reason to make them again.  They were so simple, quick, and tasty. 

To make 2 dozen cupcakes I needed:

1 full White Almond Sour Cream Cake recipe

2 batches of white  Wilton buttercream icing

Variety of sprinkles

3M Wilton decorating tip with bag

Gel food colors

I divided the cake batter into four bowls and colored them generously with green, blue, pink, and purple.  When I filled the cupcake tins, I made sure to put in a spoonful of each color in random order.  Sometimes it ended up being just one glop of each color and sometimes there was room for more.

While they were baking and cooling, I made the batches of buttercream, and like the cake batter, divided it into four parts and colored it green, blue, pink, and purple. To ice the cupcakes, I filled my icing bag with all four colors by using a spatula to put each color in a quarter of the bag (working in a circle, I thought of each "quarter" like a quarter of an hour on a clock) and made a quick swirl on top of each cupcake. Icing the cupcakes took me all of 10 minutes, sprinkles and all.

There were several things that I learned through these cupcakes.  First, icing with the decorating tip made the process about 4 times faster than it would have been by hand, and looked professional.  Second, buttercream is not a friend of direct sun, even if it's in an air-conditioned vehicle.  I brought these to a family gathering for my little sister's birthday.  We ran into a gas station for 5 minutes, and by the time we got back, the icing was melting off of two cupcakes that happened to  be in the sun.  Finally, you can buy plastic cupcake carriers at Cub Foods.  They will give you strange looks when you ask, but they will sell them to you for about $1.00.

There really wasn't anything I would change about these cupcakes.  They are probably my favorite project so far, and everyone thought they were fantastic.