This month, the Martha Stewart Cupcake Club decided to bake the Pumpkin Patch cupcake recipe. My favorite thing about this recipe... it calls for Autumn spices!!! I of course sampled the batter before adding the pumpkin and I loved the flavor! The cupcakes were extremely moist and fluffy. The recipe makes 32... so I had Tyler take the majority of the cupcakes to school with him. Let's just say that the teachers at his school may be a little spoiled this year :)
I was torn on the decoration of these cupcakes... my girlfriend and I wanted to have a dark vintage themed Halloween dinner party, so I didn't want to decorate these cupcakes with anything Halloween related. Finally I decided to frost my cupcakes with my usual swirl of my cream cheese frosting and then I added royal icing decorations. I've seen this royal icing technique used multiple times on cooking shows, so I thought I would try it out myself. First, I had to decide what I wanted to trace. I could have gone online and found a pumpkin or two, but it was midnight when I did these so I went with what I had. I took my mini pumpkin cookie cutter and traced it with a ultra fine point sharpie on a piece of regular white printer paper.
Then I mixed up some royal icing and added orange food coloring gel. I put the royal icing in a small piping bag with a #2 tip. Next, I placed a piece of parchment paper over the piece of white printer paper. Then with the piping bag, I traced the lines of the pumpkin and added some definition lines in the middle.
I let the royal icing dry overnight because I don't decorate the cupcakes until the next morning right before Tyler left for work. I like when the frosting is freshly whipped and piped on the cupcake! Once the royal icing was dry, the pumpkins slid easily off of the parchment paper and I stuck a pumpkin in each cupcake.
You can try this technique with pretty much any pattern... you'll be seeing it again in a posting coming up. Until next time, happy baking!
~Danielle
