Numero Dos in our Spring Cupcakes inspired by Pantone colors! Nothing says spring like green. These April showers bring May flowers for sure. The trees are blooming. The lawns are growing. Flowers EVERYWHERE. It's a lovely time here in NYC.
For this collection of cupcakes, I didn't just want to push myself in the flavor department, I wanted to see what I could do to blow my clients mind with decore as well, and I think I nailed it. For the Raspberry Chocolate Cheesecake cupcake from last week, we experimented with piping CHEESECAKE as roses, but I was in NY Cake and saw some amazing gum paste flowers THAT I JUST NEEDED TO HAVE.
PMS 366, I adore you. These tiered cupcakes really kicked my butt, but they came out incredible. The recipe is SUPER easy, but applying all the edible pearls and flowers was really intricate and tried my last nerve! I added almond extract to elevate the nutty flavor, and I think it was a perfect choice!
These darlings did cave a bit, but don't fear, they are still amazing and you can just cover it with frosting!
CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE DOWNLOADABLE RECIPE CARD.
Yields 12 Cupcakes in standard liners or 6 tiered cupcakes (plus 2 standard and a few babies)
I mean, c'mon, have you ever seen such beauty in something EDIBLE!?
FOR THE BATTER /
½ cup pistachios
¾ cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
½ cup butter plus 2 tbsp.
1 cup flour
⅓ cup milk
1 / Heat oven to 300˚F and line a standard cupcake pan with liners*.
2 / Put pistachios into a food processor with ½ cup sugar. Pulse until very finely chopped.
3 / In a large bowl beat the, remaining sugar, butter, eggs, flour and milk with an electric mixer until smooth.
4 / Divide the batter between cavities and bake on 22-25 minutes or until a skewer poked in comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.
FOR THE FROSTING /
1 ½ cups unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
⅓ cup finely ground pistachios
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. almond extract
1 / Beat the room temperature butter and confectioners’ sugar in the bowl on medium-high speed for 2-3 minutes, or until fluffy and pale yellow.
2 / Add the ground pistachios, salt and almond extract and beat for an additional 2-3 minutes. If you would like to color the frosting the way I did, add tiny drops of green food coloring while beating until you reach the desired shade!
ASSEMBLY /
1 / Allow cupcakes to cool completely and pipe the prepared forsting on teh cupcake with your favorite tip!*
* If you would like to create tiered cupcakes like I did, you will need cupcake pan sizes. I used standard and 2 smaller sizes. This recipe yielded about 6 tiered cupcakes, and an extra 3 standard cupcakes. (Of course plus a few more super-minis that I nibbled on!)To tier the cupcakes, I smear the frosting on every size cupcake. Then stack the mid-sized one on top. I did not remove the liner, but you can. Then (obviously) add the smallest cupcake to the top. I actually didn’t have liners for the teenie-tiny cupcakes, so they don’t have liners on them.
THESE FLOWERS! THESE. FLOWERSSSSSS! OMGEEEE are they not INCREDIBLE?! Yes, they were a bit more pricy then the typical decore we use on this blog, but it was for an important event and I wanted to WOW the PANTS OFF the crowd (mission accomplished!)!!!
I AM OBSESSED WITH THIS LARGE ROSE. It was a perfect fit for the standard cupcakes that were left.
If you want to see how all of the beauties turned out, check out the gallery below (and by "if you want to" I mean FREAKIN 'CHECK OUT MY HARD WORK, THEY LOOK AMAZE-BALLS.
Dont forget to download your free recipe card for keeps!
Can you think of any other ideas for spring cupcakes I missed? We have one more coming next week, can you guess what I went with?
