Cupcake Decorating Ideas

Flowers are the classic Mother’s Day gift, but how about tweaking this to be more personal, and more edible? There are a million different ways to do flowers with cupcakes, so for this blog post, I’m just going to limit it to Roses.

I’ll start with the easiest design, the rose buttercream swirl. This is a beautifuly simple technique – example by Sandi4tpc on Cake Central
Use a large rose piping nozzle or swirl nozzle like the Wilton 1M. Simply start in the middle of the cupcake and spiral the buttercream (frosting) outwards until the whole cupcake is covered.

You can use this technique  to do a smaller rose on a buttercream base. Have a look at this design by Claire at Little Bird Bakery

Real rose petals can also be used on top of cupcakes. Take one washed rose petal, brush in egg white and dust in granulated sugar. Once dry, this is the perfect addition to a simple cupcake. An added bonus would be to flavour the cupcake sponge and frosting with rose water. Here are some that jensteele on Flickr made:

Beyond buttercream and actual rose petals, roses can be made out of sugarpaste or cocoform.  They are a bit more fiddly to create, but very effective.
There are rose moulds you can buy, in which you press the sugarpaste or cocoform into, and out comes a perfect rose shape time after time. Here is an example by De Leukstet Taarten Shop

If you don’t have a mould, you can easily form them by hand, the simplest way is to swirl strips around each other like Gems Cottage has done.

However, the more practiced you become, the more intricate you can make your roses, like this single white rose by ejcorns on Flickr

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