Elementary, My Dear Cupcake

Meet Horatio and Nigel, the rich, British cupcakes. They say things like, “Jolly good,” “poppycock,” and “indubitably.” They enjoy counting their money, Monty Python, and guffawing.

I can’t take the credit for this clever design. I’m a big fan of Perpetual Kid, an online store for wonderfully entertaining, awesome things. They had a promotion during February to send a handwritten Valentine’s Day card to anyone who signed up. How fun, right? I got a hilariously inappropriate card from Calvin (P.S. Thanks Calvin!). But, I was drawn to the little graphic on the envelope:

I love me some monocles and cupcakes, but putting them together? Genius.

Ingredients:

Circle sugar cookies
White icing (outline and flood)
Black icing (outline and flood)
Pink icing (flood)
Tan/yellow icing (flood)
Black food writer

I chose to create a nice, white base for my cookies. So, first I outlined:

Then, I flooded.

Then I waited. And waited. And waited. Ok, it was just overnight, but it seems like forever when you’re working on an awesome cookie!

Here is the template on top of a dry cookie.

See, it fits perfectly! It was meant to be a cookie. Destiny, I tell you.

Using my handy food writer, I lightly traced the outline of the template onto the cookie.

As you can see, it doesn’t have to be perfect – you will be piping over it anyway!

For the defining line between the icing/base of the cupcake, I just freehanded it (obviously…look at that handiwork!).

Now, go ahead and use black icing to pipe over the outline (#2 tip).

I let this dry for some time, since I did not want the black icing to bleed into my lighter pink and tan icing. I get how annoying all of this waiting is…I started with the cupcake base…

Then I flooded the cupcake top.

You can see that I basically pipe a big blob of icing into the middle of the outlined area and then use a toothpick to drag the icing into the edges and grooves of the outline.