Easy Cupcakes

What could be easier than arranging candy corn around a candy raspberry? (The hardest part might be finding the candies, but you can always substitute! Use another seasonal color of candy corn and put a gumdrop in the center instead.)

What You Need: 1 cupcake; white frosting; 6 pink candy corns (sold around Valentine’s Day and in candy shops); gummi red raspberry candy.

How to Make It: Place raspberry candy in center of cupcake. Surround with candy corn with the pointy ends pointing inward to form a flower shape.

All it takes is pastel colored candy corn and M&Ms (available around Easter time, or at specialty shops) to make pretty flower cupcakes.

What You Need: 1 cupcake; white frosting; 7 pastel candy corns; 1 pastel M&M.

How to Make It: Frost cupcake. Place M&M upside down in the center of the cupcake. Surround with candy corn, alternating colors, with the white tips facing inward toward the M&M center.

These sunflower cupcakes are minty fresh and easy-as-can-be.

What You Need: 1 cupcake; frosting (white or whatever you’d like); yellow mini mints (smooth and melty, the kind with white nonpareils on the flat side); chocolate sprinkles.

How to Make It: Frost cupcake white. Add yellow mints, arranged in two circles but leaving a space in the center. Sprinkle chocolate jimmies in the center, guiding them with your hand or a funnel.

You’ll need to break out the decorating tips for this cupcake, but making daisies is easy, I promise! You don’t even have to have a pastry bag and metal tips. Just buy a tube of white icing (Wilton and CakeMate makes them) and the plastic, four-tip set. One of those is a “rose” tip: wide at one end and thinner at the other.
What You Need: 1 cupcake; frosting tinted green; frosting tinted yellow; white frosting; pastry bag and metal tips #104 and #3, or prepackaged tube and tips. (I used royal icing, so my daisy is hard and crunchy. But you can use regular icing and make the daisy right on your cupcake.)
How to Make It: Frost cupcake green. Use round tip to draw trellis pattern (grid) on top of cupcake. Practice making daisies on waxed paper (you can reuse the icing) before making one directly on your cupcake. Hold bag or tube with tip #104 perpendicular or at a slight angle (daisies are very forgiving), with the wide end of the tip facing either directly away from you or directly toward you. Start about 1 1/2 inches out from what will be the center of your daisy, squeeze, and ease up on pressure as you pull tip toward center. Repeat around. Use #3 tip to pipe yellow center.

These lovely, pink-tinged flowers are made from marshmallows. If you’d prefer a smaller flower, just use mini marshmallows. A more colorful flower: tinted marshmallows. You get the picture.
What You Need: 1 cupcake (baked and cooled); frosting (we used pink); marshmallows; round red candy; pink sugar crystals; kitchen shears (or plain old scissors, but they’ll get sticky.)
How to Make It: Frost cupcake. Cut three marshmallows in half as shown. Sprinkle with pink sugar crystals, which will stick to the sticky marshmallows. Arrange 5 marshmallow halves on top of cupcake and place red candy in center. (You will have an extra marshmallow petal left over. Eat it or make more cupcakes.)

In a future post, we’ll show you how to make sunflower cupcakes with a decorating bag and star tip, but for those of you without the tools or time for that fanciness, here’s how to go about making easy sunflower cupcakes.

What You Need: 1 cupcake (baked and cooled); icing tinted yellow; brown M&Ms.
How To Make It: Frost cupcake yellow. Make sure to get a good, thick coat of icing on there. Then, use a knife or small spatula to pull the frosting up into peaks. Then simply drop three brown M&Ms into the center. Voila! Sunflowers.