Cupcakes just aren’t cupcakes without icing and decorations. However, some people may have their reasons for not wishing to buy ready-made frosting. Homemade cupcake frosting can be delicious, too, if you know how to make it. Besides, it could also be healthier, because you can control what you put inside. This cream cheese frosting is only one of the many ideas: you can use peanut butter, chocolate, fondant, buttercream or icing sugar.
Ingredients:
- 1/2 pound cream cheese
- 1/2 pound whipped cream
- 1/4 pound white chocolate
- Food coloring (optional, if you don’t want the frosting to be white)
These quantities should be enough for at least one dozen cupcakes, but if you spread it thin, it can be enough for two dozens. It usually depends on how thick you like the frosting to be, so what works for me may not be the same for you. Anyway, after you try the homemade frosting once, you’ll know how many cupcakes you can decorate with such and such quantities.
Method:
In a bowl, mix the cream cheese with the whipped cream. Melt the white chocolate (steaming is my favorite method). Add the melted chocolate to the mix, blend everything well and you’re done. The cream cheese frosting goes very well with fresh fruit and gelatin toppings, for creating refreshing and original cupcake recipes.
This is a chocolate cupcake recipe I’ve got from my grandmother. She used to bake great cakes when we were kids. She always said appetizers and desserts are the most important moments of a meal. If appetizers aren’t good, guests would lose interest in the following courses. If dessert is lousy, guests would forget how wonderful the previous courses were, because they’d feel sick. Yes, grandma was a smart woman. This is how she made chocolate cupcakes:
These letter-shaped candies come in a pack of 12 alphabet sets, four sets for each of the following colors: pink, yellow and blue. That’s good, because if you have a lot of guests, you may need to bake several dozens of cupcakes for your baby shower party, therefore you’ll make use of a lot of letters.
Baby shower cupcakes can be anything one can imagine, from cute teddy bears, yellow ducklings or little frogs to pink and blue flowers, ribbons, baby rattles or baby strollers. All these are cute, there’s no doubt. However, they hardly equal the emotions generated by the sight of those little baby feet that are the symbol of a newborn baby. This is one of the coolest ideas for baby shower cupcakes: decorate them with tiny baby feet prints made from hard sugar and colored in pink and blue. The cake decorations are Kosher certified, made from sugar and colored with food coloring. The $6.98 set contains 6 pairs of blue feet and 6 pairs of pink feet sized 1 1/4″. There are just enough feet to decorate a dozen 
Back to our ladybug cupcakes, here’s an example of edible hard sugar decorations available on Amazon for as little as $6.58 for 16 pieces. Made 100% from sugar and food coloring, these decorations are Kosher certified and safe for children’s consumption. Even so, children parties should be closely supervised by adults, because a small child could choke with such decorations if left unattended.
This flexible silicone baking pan allows you to bake not only ladybug-shaped cupcakes, but also butterflies, bees and dragonflies. Just prepare your favorite cake butter or muffin mix, pour it into the mold, bake it and add some colorful icing to reproduce the various bugs’ looks. The kids would be sorry to eat their dessert because they will want to keep it. This cupcakes pan measures 10 3/4” x 8 ¼” x 1 1/4″, it is dishwasher safe and can be used in the hot oven up to 450 F. One pan bakes 8 cupcakes, muffins or gelatin figures.
These paper boxes are great for kids parties, if you want to send your guests home with a sweet treat. This way, they will remember the great time they spent at your party. The boxes are made from thick paper and they feature an adjustable insert which allows cupcakes to remain undamaged. The price is $3.99 for a set of four ladybug cupcakes boxes. They are just so sweet!
These candy confetti sprinkles are available on Amazon for the price of $2.69 the 1.5 oz. jar. Being edible, they are perfect for cupcake decorating in case there are children amongst your dinner guests. The jar contains a mix of candies in shapes of little ducks, chickens and bunnies, in various pale colors such as blue, pink, orange, yellow and white. The candies are certified Kosher and they contain the following ingredients: sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (cottonseed, soybean), dextrin, soy lecithin, corn starch, carnauba wax, confectioners glaze, natural and artificial flavors and artificial coloring.
This decoration kit has really cute items, but some of them could be a bit too big for cupcakes topping. Anyway, this is what you get for your $25.81:
If you want to make your own cupcake toppers, you could use one of these sets which will help you make gum paste flowers that look quite realistic. The set includes 24 plastic cutters, a leaf mold, 2 foam squares for modeling, 3 modeling tools and a book with instructions for use and cake decoration ideas. The set is designed to be used with gum paste, but it works with fondant, too. It’s fairly easy to use, but sophisticated models like roses may require some practice before they come out perfect. Anyway, cutting your own
Buttercream Icing Recipe
Ingredients for 12 cupcakes:
Method:
Take the butter out of the fridge, put it in a bowl and let it melt at room temperature until it becomes soft. Then cream the butter by steering it with a wooden spoon. This should take you about 5 minutes. In a separate bowl, sift the icing sugar, then start adding it to the cream butter, one spoon at a time, mixing continuously. It’s strongly advisable to sift the icing sugar, not necessarily because of the impurities it may contain, but because it usually forms lumps which would be very difficult to get rid of, once you mix the sugar in the butter cream. Sifting will help you obtain a fine buttercream icing for your cupcakes. Another useful tip for the perfect homemade buttercream: don’t mix it too much, especially if you decide to use a kitchen mixer instead of the wooden spoon, because it would lead to air bubbles formation inside the mixture. These bubbles are a real pain and they would spoil the effect of your cupcakes icing.
Optionally, you can add a few drops of food coloring and flavors such as vanilla extract or almond extract. Colored extracts would change the color of the frosting, so you need to buy clear extracts if you want to prevent that. Please be aware that the color of this buttercream icing is not pure white, because the butter itself is not white. If you need a perfectly white frosting, then you should replace the butter with shortening, but that’s already another cupcake icing recipe.