A Cupcake Birthday

Well, if you read my first blog post, you know the whole reason I started caking was for my kiddos.  I figured 2 birthday cakes a year for the next 18 years (not to mention all those school bake sales and class parties) were enough to justify taking some classes!  With 2 classes under my belt, I felt like I was ready to conquer the caking world...queue catastrophe here.  If you've been following me since the beginning, you've learned that I'm not very tech savvy.  I'm actually amazed that I'm able to publish a post on a weekly basis!  With my daughter's first birthday around the corner, I was considering invite options.  Usually I turn to my sister-in-law for invites (she's amazing, check out her stuff here), but somehow the time had gotten away from me so I had to look into other options.  The first place I turned to was Facebook.  I wrote up a mock invite and was playing around with the options and somehow, unbeknownst to me, I had created an open invitation and had invited ALL my friends....all 300+ of them!   HYPERVENTILATING!!!  How do I even know this many people??  How am I going to feed this many people??  There were definitely a few weeks of panicking, but at the end of the day all my friends and family came and none of my elementary school buddies that I haven't seen for 15+ years showed up (not that I don't love you all)!  Oh happy day!!  So, now that catastrophe numero uno was under control, enter problem number 2.  I still had over 50 people coming and I didn't know how to do tiered cakes yet.  Fortunately, I had any easy fix for this one...cupcakes!!!

I decided to make 3 different kinds, chocolate with Oreo frosting, lemon blueberry with lemon cream cheese frosting and banana with chocolate peanut butter frosting.  Today, I'm demonstrating how to do the quintessential cupcake swirl.  You'll be making professional looking cupcakes in no time!

Just a little side note here, I made those pink cupcake holders using this tutorial.  I subbed out the candlestick holders for goblets though as I thought they would be sturdier.  They are a cute, cheap fix for when you have alot of cupcakes to display.

Now back to the baking, I decided to show you how to make the chocolate peanut butter cupcakes because we're actually making 2 different frostings and swirling them together in one piping bag, so let's get started.  First you'll need to prepare the frosting using this recipe.  I should warn you now, this stuff is ADDICTING!!  I swear I could put this on my cereal, in my coffee, squeeze it right into my mouth from the piping bag - you get it, big time yum!

Now it's time to fit your piping bag with Wilton tip 1M open star tip (some people prefer to use a 2D closed star tip, play around with them and see which you prefer).  So in order to swirl the colors together we need to put the chocolate frosting on one side of the piping bag and the peanut butter on the other.

It doesn't need to be perfect since we're just swirling them together anyways.  Now it's time to pipe!

Just start with a large base circle and keep piping smaller circles as you work your way up until you're happy with the height.  Keep steady pressure as you squeeze and remember to stop squeezing at the end before you lift out the tip so your cupcake doesn't have a tail.

When it comes to cupcake swirls, it's the embellishments that put them over the top.  For the lemon cupcakes I put a few fresh blueberries on top, I found mini Oreos for the Oreo cupcakes and for the chocolate peanut butter ones I cut mini Reese Peanut Butter Cups in half and put them on top.

Yep, that looks good enough to eat.

Happy cupcaking until next week!