How to Make Striped Cupcake Frosting

Hi! Happy Friday! Thank goodness it's the weekend, right? Have I mentioned how I really don't like going to work and basically live for the evenings at home and the weekend? Because I do. And this should be a pretty good weekend. Joe and I get to stay at home and we should make some pretty good progress on our built-ins. We're also going to do some garage saling (woo-hoo!!!) and just generally relax. Sounds good to me! Unfortunately we won't get to spend Mother's Day with either of our Moms but I hope they both have a wonderful Mother's Day. Same goes to all the other Moms who may be reading this! We love you ladies!

I've done quite a bit of baking in the past few weeks and one of the occasions I baked for was a Birthday Blessings delivery. Birthday Blessings recently added the option of letting the child decide if they'd like a cake or cupcakes, and the most recent one I signed up for was cupcakes. I must say it was way quicker than making and decorating a cake! They still give guidelines for favorite cake and icing flavors, as well as favorite colors. This little girl's favorite colors were pink and purple so I thought it would be fun to try the striped icing like I did on the St. Pat's Pot o' Gold muffins last year. I also picked out some pink, black and white cheetah print cupcake liners because they were cute :) Since I'd done this technique once before, I knew a couple tricks, but I also learned some things this go round. But overall, it's still pretty fool proof. Here's what you'll need:

 - A large pastry bag, probably 14" - 16" (you want it to be big enough to hold the icing for all the cupcakes at once)
- A 1M pastry tip (A large start tip)
- A large cup to old the icing bag
- Gel food coloring
- Toothpicks
- Buttercream Icing - I'd say 3-4 cups for 2 dozen cupcakes

First, place your pastry tip into the pastry bag. Then fold the the bag at the tip and place into your large cup. I fold the end over so that no icing leaks out, but also to let the bag go farther down into the bowl. Fold the edges of the pastry bag over the cup. Try and smooth out the inside so there aren't too many wrinkles.

Dip a toothpick into your first icing color and use it to "draw" a line of color inside the bag. One thing I learned this time is that the closer you can get the line to the bottom of the bag (toward the pastry tip), the less icing you'll waste waiting for the color to make it's way out. Continue drawing your lines of food coloring around the bag until you have all the colors you'd like.

Then pile in the icing! Be careful to not stir it around or anything. You want the stripes to stay in nice lines. What I learned the first time I tried this with the St. Pat's muffins was that you can't just go back and add more icing and expect the same results. The colors get squished together and don't come out very vibrantly. If you do have to refill your icing bag, I would recommend starting with fresh food coloring stripes. That's why you have to use a big bag!

I promise it all fit! I carefully lifted the bag out of the cup then kind of shook the icing down the rest of the way. 

Once your bag is ready to go, start squeezing icing out until you start seeing the color. I had a few extra cupcakes so I iced those first, but still didn't see any color come out. So I squeezed some into my mixing bowl. Once the color started, I moved on to the rest of my cupcakes. You'll be able to tell that the first few were still a little light in color, but I was afraid that if I didn't start icing them, I'd run out before I was done. I had just enough though!

Even after icing 4 cupcakes, there was no color coming out yet. 

There's the color! 

I think they turned out cute and I hope the little girl liked them. These are really fun and easy if you need something in a certain color and you don't want to dye the entire batch of icing. Plus, people will be really impressed and will think they were store bought :) Even if you don't do the striped icing, using a pastry bag and the 1M pastry tip will make the icing look much more "professional" and believe me, it's way easier than trying to use a knife to spread on icing! Let me know if anyone tries this out, I'd love to see what you guys make! Have a great weekend!