I *love* cupcakes! If I can, I’ll find any excuse to make, serve, or share them. I am one of those people that, 14 years ago when I got married- had cupcakes instead of a wedding cake. You know what the best thing about cupcakes is, though? They’re about 100x easier to decorate than a cake. You don’t have to be an artist or a cake decorator to make them fun and beautiful.
So, today I am going to share with you some of the easiest, cutest ways to decorate your cupcakes for Valentine’s Day- or any Holiday, really!
Prep
First, you’re going to start with plain cupcakes. I bought a Strawberry Cake Mix box and made my own. But, you can definitely buy them plain from the store (un-iced, even!) Once I bought a bunch of un-iced cupcakes for my son’s Science themed birthday party and let the kids go to town on decorating them and it was a hit!
Next, find yourself some cute cupcake liners. I grabbed these for under $4 at HomeGoods! You can bake your cupcakes straight inside of them- they’ll make about 12 because they’re larger than a traditional liner. Or, you can even just slide your store bought ones inside. Easy peasy, right?
Decorate
Now you’re going to gather your icing and toppings. I bought Vanilla Marshamallow frosting because it tastes AH-Mazing and used some food color gel to dye some plain white icing pink. We also found these really cute chocolate filled strawberry marshmallows- which is what originally gave me the idea for this post in the first place!
I put some icing in a piping bag and swirled it on the top for the pink cupcakes, and the white I just used a ziploc baggie with the corner cut off. You don’t have to have fancy kitchen gadgets to make pretty cupcakes!
Some inexpensive sprinkles from Target prettied up these simply iced cupcakes, nicely! I used to work at an Ice Cream shop, and we decorated cakes there. Our motto was “sprinkles make everything better” because we were definitely not experts, being 17 at the time. We’d do our best, then put sprinkles all over it, and people always thought we did amazing. Sprinkles really do make everything more festive. And not only on Valentine’s Day.
All I did for these was literally smear a bunch of icing on top and dumped it in mini chocolate chip! And honestly, these turned out to be the best tasting ones!
Enjoy
I call this, “strawberry dipped chocolate cupcake with chocolate dipped strawberry marshmallow”. Maybe that’s a little much? Whatever you call it, I call it yum!
You can even put store bought cookies on top and make it doubly sugary and delightful. Calories don’t count on Holidays, right?
Don’t think just because you’re not super creative in the kitchen that you can’t have festive treats for you or your family. It really is so simple to make delicious, fun snacks that your whole family can enjoy… they don’t even have to know how easy it was- I won’t tell!
Like I said before, this works for any Holiday. Especially Christmas and Halloween where you can buy mini versions of everything to throw on top of your cupcakes.
Let me know if you try these tips- and leave me a comment telling me which is your favorite. And just for fun, I’ll share with you what I accidentally did while taking these photos……..
Mayyyybe I don’t recommend stacking them and then knocking them over with books. Icing EVERYWHERE! Be warned. I also ate my weight in icing and sprinkles to bring this post to you- so, you’re welcome.
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