Tropical Cupcakes

WARNING: I am going to be a little braggy in this post. I'm quite proud of what I accomplished here, and I'll be patting myself on the back throughout this entry :).


My sister-in-law, Carleigh, is getting married next month. She currently lives in California and she was in town visiting a couple weeks ago, so we threw her a bridal shower. I helped Tony's mom by volunteering to make a treat for the party. Carleigh is obsessed with all things "beach" so Tony's mom decided to have an island/beach theme for the shower. How fun! I decided to make mini Pina Colada Cupcakes for the shower, and they were delicious!

I'm proud to say that my creative juices came flowing back to me the week of the shower. After a test run of these cupcakes (and a hefty cupcake donation to Tony's co-workers), I decided that these cupcakes were awesome, but needed something else. For some reason, icing flowers popped into my head. I have made cupcakes with sunflowers piped onto them, so I began researching what it would take to make a tropical icing flower to top these little guys.

I settled on a petunia, because I though it looked like the flowers found in Hawaiian leis. I bought the supplies I needed, which included bright teal blue icing coloring gel, royal icing mix, and a lily nail.
This is a lily nail. It's pretty intense. It makes it so you can pipe a more 3-dimensional flower. I felt pretty professional as I worked with this tool.

My first attempt at making these flowers was a complete and utter FAILURE. I was going off of some written directions on wilton.com, and it was just not working out for me. My flowers looked like a 2-year-old did them. A batch of royal icing wasted and severely blue tinted fingers later, I went to the source of knowledge of all things: youtube. I found a tutorial video, slapped my forehead as I realized I was completely doing it wrong, and tried my hand at piping petunias a couple days later. Thanks to this lovely lady who posted her video, I wound up with this:

A perfectly formed petunia! I was so proud! Unfortunately my celebration didn't last long, I had 49 more of these babies to pipe out! I spend a couple hours piping flowers and decorating them with edible pearl dust and stamens so they looked realistic. These flowers were quite legit.

Here is a picture of the flowers completely decorated:
My flowers took FIVE DAYS to dry and before popping them off of the foil I had to stick them in the freezer for a few minutes. I learned this the hard way and ended up with a few flower casualties in the process.

Tony and I were getting a little sick of bright blue petunias after a while. They took over our kitchen table and I was quite protective of them. :)





The finished product! I love how these turned out (fyi: I toasted the coconut that goes on top of these cupcakes. The recipe doesn't say to, but I think it looks and tastes better). I love that these cupcakes look like little hula dancers! :)


I may have made this sound super hard, but if you have patience and a steady hand, you can TOTALLY make these flowers! By doing this project, I began to get back to my pre-pregnancy self. However, after it was all over I vowed to Tony that I would never do anything like that again. (We all know I will)