The Big "1"

This weekend we celebrated my daughters first birthday.We didn't do anything big, just had some family and friends over for cake and ice cream. I made her the "big cupcake" that I mentioned in my last post, and it actually came out really cute. I let the kids make their own ice cream sundays with sprinkles, whipped cream, and all the toppings. We had a lot of fun. Everyone wanted to know how I made the cupcakes so I decided that would be a good topic for this post. 

So first lets start with supplies......

I decided to make her a Funfetti cake, I thought that it went well with the Minnie Mouse theme and kids seem to love it. This time I used the Pillsbury brand but it doesn't really matter, I usually just grab what's on sale, they all taste good to me. Here's a little secret I picked up from my sister, add a pudding cup to the cake batter and it makes the cake come out really moist and delicious. 

I'm sure you've all seen the "Big Top Cupcake" commercial...that's the pan I used to bake the cake in. I had never baked in silicone bakeware, so I googled directions. The directions that I found said to lightly grease the pan, and I did...and the cake still ended up sticking!!! So it all fell apart, but I put it back together and this is the result.

Can you tell that it fell apart? 

I used some of the icing to patch it back together.

To decorate the cake I used a decorating bag and a 1M size piping tip. 

 

Using a decorating bag is easy, I learned by reading the box insert that came with a set that I got from Walmart. I added a page to the blog for tutorials, check out the cupcake decorating one I found.  

I find that craft stores such as Michael's have a bigger selection of piping tips and bag sizes. Another good thing about the craft store is they have couplers, these are the white pieces that connect the tip to the bag. These come in handy if you want to use different decorating tips for the same icing.

For the small cupcakes I used purple and pink icing. I have a pack of McCormack primary colors food coloring. They come in little squeeze bottles and the back of the box tells you how many drops of each color to mix in order to get the icing color you are looking for. I also had a container of Wilton 6 mix sprinkles that I had used for another occasion. The container had sprinkles shaped as daisies, hearts, dots, leaves, wildflowers, and butterflies. I used the dots for the big cupcake, and the daisies for the small ones. I also used some plain course sugar sprinkles in pink and purple. 

Here is the final result....

This is the face of the birthday girl....I think she liked it!!