We were invited to a family BBQ this weekend, so I decided to make some Fourth of July cupcakes. They are just plain vanilla cupcakes, but I decided to revisit a technique I used when I made my wife’s unicorn birthday cake a few years back and color swirl the frosting and the cake.
I followed this recipe from Life, Love, and Sugar. I didn’t actually need the instructions for doing the color swirling, but I hardly ever make cupcakes and didn’t have a go-to recipe of my own. The TL;DR is that you simply split the batter and the frosting into thirds and color them separately. I dropped a few tablespoons of each colored batter into cupcake cups and swirled them with a toothpick. This is probably the scariest part because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out until it’s baked, and really, bitten into. You need to swirl it enough to get the effect, but not so much that you mix the colors up and end up with grey cupcakes.
The trick for the frosting is to lay out plastic wrap and make stripes of your colors on it. You then roll that up and put it into a piping bag. Then, when you pipe it out, ta-da, it’s a multicolored swirl. Obviously, I went with red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July Cupcakes.
I had some consistency issues. The frosting was too warm after the time spent dividing and mixing it, so I refrigerated it. Then it got too solid, so I had to warm it again.. etc, etc. So the piping came out pretty messy, but the effect still worked well.
The swirl effect in the cupcakes actually worked really well!
