EZ Colorful Cupcake Topping

Bake your favorite cupcakes, then top with icing and colored sugars, rainbow jimmies, or nonpareils, or a combination. "Gluing" colored sugars onto glaze-topped cupcakes results in festive-looking snacks that have less topping than those with swirly, buttercream mounds of frosting.

The pixstrip shows the following image areas:

1. Cupcakes, topping ingredients, implements
2. Glaze items
   1. Ingredients and implements
   2. Vanilla poured into pan with water in it
   3. Powdered sugar mixed into pan (3 successive images)
3. Glazing and sugaring process
   1. Applying glaze to cupcake (I applied glaze with spoon instead of dipping cupcake top because of the cake crumbliness.)
   2. Moving color sugar-coated cupcake to rack
   3. Placing done cupcake onto pan
4. Topped cupcakes on plate

Implements (for Topping the Cupcakes)

• Cup for powdered sugar
• Measuring spoons
• Small, shallow pan for mixing the glaze
• Fork for mixing glaze ingredients
• Shallow bowls or saucers for colored sugars (I used 6" paper plates that I folded for pouring sugars back into their jars.)
• Pan or rack for cupcakes
• Spoon for distributing glaze on cupcakes if necessary (Fetched when the dip-cupcake-into-glaze attempt worked poorly.)

Ingredients

• Cupcakes
  12 baked cupcakes (I used half recipe of yellow cake mix and blended in 3 tablespoons of rainbow jimmies.
• Glaze ingredients (I used 1/2 recipe for simple powdered sugar glaze.)
  • 1 C powdered sugar
  • 1 1/2 tbsp water
  • 1/4 tsp vanilla
• Colorful sugars (suggestions as follows)
  • Colored sugars
  • Rainbow jimmies
  • Nonpareils (I skipped.)
  • Other

Note: The amount of glaze is for 12 cupcakes (a half-box recipe for standard cake mix powder, which contains approximately 15 or 16ish ounces.) Double the amount of glaze ingredients if you plan to decorate 24 cupcakes.

Instructions

• Bake or obtain a dozen cupcakes. (Suggestion: For more colorfulness, fold in 3 tablespoons of rainbow jimmies into the batter.) After baking, remove the cupcakes onto a cooling rack.
• Make the glaze. (I used a fork to stir the water and 1vanilla into a shallow pan, then stirred in the powdered sugar.)
• Dip tops of cupcakes onto the glaze, lightly dip them onto sugars, and set them rightside up onto the rack.

Post-recipe Thoughts
I will never, ever again use the Duncan Hines Classic Butter Golden cake mix. With my first half-box batch, I filled 12 oil-sprayed cupcake wells as I normally do. The baked cakes had encroached the top of the pan, resulting in "muffintop" looks. They were difficult to extract from the pan. Many partially crumbled.

With the second half-box batch, I sprayed oil more generously, and poured the batter over 16 wells. After baking, the cakes looked like they hardly rose. Moreover, they were also difficult to extract. The prominent fail part was trying to hold a cake in preparation to dipping it into the glaze. It was as fragile as a cornbread muffin, making it necessary to improvise and smear the glaze. In any case, the results were pretty ugly.

FWIW, the recipe calls for soft butter instead of oil, and less than half of the usual amount of water. The beating instructions required 30 seconds for initial blending, like "normal" cake instructions. However, it required 4 minutes of medium beating instead of the "normal" 2 minutes on high. The batter was very thick, and messy to distribute.

Visit my YouTube video to see more details of this recipe's process.

Related Articles

• Icing (glaze): Those Two-Tone Confetti Cupcakes
• Additional colorful sweets: A Convenient Cake Mix Cooky Batch--Easter

Those Two-Tone Confetti Cupcakes

This article is one of my rare ones about food that is more analysis than recipe. Last month, I made Cinnamon Two-Tone Cupcakes with 1/2 box of yellow cake mix, using Wilton two-tone cake inserts. I observed that the interior columns of the cakes were blobby. This time, for the other half box, instead of a cinnamon and nutmeg mix for the interior part, I used 3 tablespoons of rainbow jimmies.

This batch came out worse looking than the cinnamon ones. The interior "columns" seem to have clumped together, some pooling at the bottom. The (confetti) jimmies look smeary after baking. I'm thinking that the combination of moistness and baking temperature partly dissolves those decorations. (A magnified pic in Confetti Cupcake Bites shows the same kind of smeariness.)

Icing

I used 1/2 recipe for simple powdered sugar glaze, omitting the vanilla. I used a fork to stir 1 1/2 tablespoons of water into a container with 1 cup of powdered sugar. With the cupcakes bunched together on the cooling rack atop a baking pan, I poured the glaze onto the cupcakes.

I had set the iced cupcakes in refrigerator for an hour or so, then "sugared" them up as follows:

1. Poured some red-color sugar on a saucer. (Happy Valentine's Day today!)
2. Placed each cupcake upside down onto the sugar and rotated the cake to coat its top.
3. Placed each of the cakes right side up.

Note: The image at the top of the article shows some cupcakes with glaze only and others with glaze and red sugar.

Post-batch Thoughts

 Batter Process
For the time I spent on dispensing the batters into the Wilton inserts and achieving the blobby, bland-looking baked results, I would not make the confetti version again. (If making confetti cupcakes, blend in maybe 5 to 6 tablespoons of jimmies into one batter bowl, foregoing Wilton cupcake inserts.)

The cinnamon two-tone cupcakes, although blobby, show visual contrast and taste really good. The image at page 31 of https://app.box.com/s/r62gd7ax0ctgjcw9os6bih5ic1z12vva shows more details than the image in the cinnamon cupcake article.

 Cake Topping Process
For future cupcake icing projects, I would pour the icing in small, tight circles or dip the tops of the cakes into the icing container. And I'd sugar them immediately instead of waiting till later. Why not coat with frosting?

• I don't have any canned frosting in the house and don't want to buy any.
• I have loads of powdered sugar I want to use up but don't want to make frosting using perishables like butter and milk.
• I want to use up some of the many colored sugars I have in the pantry.