July 4th Cupcakes

Posted by Lori:

Last week my family was away at camp all week.  We had a great time! 

For a recipe tip today, I wanted to share with you how to make striped icing.  I showed my daughter this technique and she created these cute July 4th Cupcakes for our youth group Sunday night.

Make Buttercream Icing:

1/2 cup shortening

1/2 cup butter (not margarine), softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 cups powdered sugar
2 Tablespoons milk

In a large bowl, cream together butter and shortening. Add vanilla. Blend in the powdered sugar - one cup at a time - beating well in between additions. Add milk and mix until light and fluffy.

Directions for striped icing:

Place desired decorating tip into icing bag.  Place icing bag into large cup.  Roll down top of bag to the edge of the large cup.  Carefully paint on stripes of icing color (we used Wilton gel, but I originally learned to do this with paste.  The gel is more "goopy" so we should have started with less of the gel for the stripes. You can tell that some of the cupcakes are iced at the beginning of the gel tinting and some are later on.)

Place large spoonfuls of icing into tinted bag.  Roll up bag to secure and decorate cupcakes as desired.  We used a large 4B star tip.

(Obviously this is a first one, where we used too much gel in the stripes.  I just wanted you to see how it looked close up.  The kids didn't mind, but it wasn't appealing to me!  Pretty to look at, though!)