The student news site of Wayland High School

Wayland Student Press

The student news site of Wayland High School

Wayland Student Press

The student news site of Wayland High School

Wayland Student Press

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Scrambled: Frosting, it’s a piece of cake

As excited as I was to not have school on Thursday, I couldn’t avoid the stark white, headache-inducing pile of College Essays on my computer desk.

I’m proud to say I was able to get a few done, but I must admit I was distracted. I couldn’t ignore the silence of my empty house any longer. My family was out, the kitchen was perfectly clean and I had a brand new book of cupcake recipes.

A friend recently gave me this book and it was unlike any other. It was the size of a notebook, light pink with curly writing, and a picture of a beautifully frosted cupcake. I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer — I needed something sweet.

I love cupcakes. Sure, it’s because they are cute and portioned perfectly, but my favorite part about cupcakes is frosting them (and eating them, of course).

When I first started frosting cupcakes I used a simple butter knife. I would play with different kinds of swirls and designs and eventually food coloring. Don’t get me wrong; frosting cupcakes with a butter knife works perfectly, but I wanted to expand my repertoire of cupcake designs by purchasing my very own pastry bag.

I learned that disposable plastic bags work perfectly because you can throw them away when you’re done and all you need to do is wash the metal tip. Ms. Miller happened to ask me about using pastry bags this week, so I’m so excited to share what I’ve learned about them!

There are several kinds of tips you can use to frost cupcakes (or anything else that needs frosting), and each tip can be used to make multiple designs.

The standard frosting tip is a round tip (large or small). The large tip is great for making beautiful clouds of frosting, where the small tip is better used for doing smaller detail work.

Next is the star tip, which can be either opened or closed. Open star tips are great for making large swirls of frosting, or you can use the closed star tip to make swirls that resemble ribbons.

Finally we have the French tip. This tip is great for creating a more detailed swirl called a Francophile.

The fancy names don’t matter, though I plan to show you what all of the frosting designs look like over the course of this blog. My best advice is to practice piping frosting on a plate before you frost your dessert. This way you can avoid air bubbles in your pastry bag and build up some confidence in your piping skills.

Most importantly, remember that you can always scrape the frosting off of a cupcake you made a mistake on and put it back into the pastry bag. Your cupcake will look as good as new once you re-frost it.

After spending over an hour scanning my beautiful new cupcake recipe book, I found a promising recipe: Snickerdoodle Cupcakes (also knows as cinnamon cupcakes). This recipe stood out to me because the cinnamon kept with my autumn theme of cooking seasonally and because I actually had all of the ingredients.

I decided to frost these cupcakes using the large round tip. There is a picture below, so you can see how I tried to make my clouds of frosting. I hope this inspires you to try a new cupcake flavor and a new frosting method!

(Credit: Carolyn Jones/WSPN)
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  • P

    Pam MillerOct 11, 2011 at 11:33 AM

    Cupcake Wars watch out! …….here comes Carolyn!! Absolutely beautiful cupcake.

    Reply
  • M

    MaryOct 5, 2011 at 9:00 PM

    They were soooo good too!

    Reply
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Scrambled: Frosting, it’s a piece of cake