DISCLAIMER: In third grade, I showed my art project to my teacher and she held it up in front of the room “Everyone look up here,” she said. “Kimberly did her project wrong. Look at this! She colored in the complete wrong direction here and look how bad it looks! I don’t want to see anyone else make the mistakes that Kimberly made.” Then she turned to me and continued loudly, “Kimberly, I have no choice but to hang it up on our bulletin board with all the other students’ projects so you are going to have to see it everyday and be embarrassed at this stupid mistake.”

I wish that I was exaggerating but not only is this a true story, but I still remember her as one of my favorite teachers. What does that say about my personality??

I bring this up because I want to make it very clear: I am not an artsy-craftsy person. My sister got all of those genes. I can’t cut straight, I have terrible penmanship and whenever I do any kind of art project, I end up with more materials on me than on the project.

Alright, now that you have been properly warned, I want to talk about cake decorating. This is seriously the easiest cake decorating you will ever learn! I will let you be the judge on the results but after spending an hour up to my elbows in buttercream, I think these cupcakes are kind of cute.

I took a cupcake decorating class a few weeks ago, and to be honest, I only gleaned one new skill: making that fun green grass. The bakery chef also tried to teach us how to make pastry bags out of parchment paper and well….see my disclaimer. I couldn’t recreate the magic at home, so I resorted to an old standby:

With ziplock bags and a pair of scissors, you can make your own pastry bags! I’m not going to lie, it gets a little messy. When you squeeze the bag, then frosting sometimes opens the bag on top and than you have a huge mess. I tried using the slide bags above but the bottoms of the bags were a little weird so the opening got too big, but I am getting ahead of myself.

To make your own pastry bags:

  1. Spoon frosting into bag.
  2. Seal bag and push frosting to bottom of bag.
  3. Snip off the tiniest little corner you can.

A common mistake that happens is that you snip too big. See below to compare the grass between a little snip and a bigger snip.

 

Start small because you can always make it bigger.

To make your own Easter grass:

  1. Use green and yellow food coloring to make that grass green color.
  2. Make your own pastry bag with the tiniest opening possible.
  3. Squiggle it all over the cupcake. Sorry, I don’t have a more technical term. The higher the grass, the cooler it looks.
    Note for those who liked to play in the sand as kids: It’s kind of like witch castles or Dairy Queen sandcastles (You’ll either get this or you won’t).

To make flowers, I find the easiest way is to do a dot of pink (or purple) and then a dot of yellow in the middle. You can make individual pedals but I have patience for about two cupcakes using that method.

 

You can also tuck in jellybeans or M&Ms in the grass to make it even easier!

Here are a few more pictures of the cupcakes I will be bringing to book club tonight. I had to miss part of last month’s meeting to attend this cupcake decorating class. Let’s hope they are impressed enough to excuse the absence.

For the non-grassy ones, I just did a blob of frosting with a contrasting dot. To get the blob, just press the pastry bag down and keep squeezing. The frosting will create frosting bubble around the opening. No knives or spreading needed!

 

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