Cupcakes - Filling, Frosting, and Toppers

I love cupcakes. 

My husband loves cupcakes. 

My parents love cupcakes. 

I blame my mother. She makes the most delicious white cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting. They are simple but are always super moist and have the perfect cupcake to icing ratio. Unfortunately, I cannot make cupcakes as good as my mom. To disguise my weakness, I like to make cupcakes with filling and pretty swirled tops. 

There are a lot of ways to get filling into a cupcake. You can buy a little tool that will hollow out the middle of the cupcake, use a knife and cut out the middle yourself, or you can buy this nifty little cupcake decorating kit from Wilton for $8 (or for $4 if you use a coupon.) The kit comes with 4 tips, one is long and designed to fill cupcakes. 

I like this method because it isn't messy and the less raspberry filling on my counters, the better. All you do is put the tip into a bag and cut off the excess, fill it with your filling, poke it into the cupcake and squeeze. You can see the little bit of filling poking through the tops of the cupcakes - this will get covered and no one will know it was there. 

Helpful Hint: You can use fruit jams, like Smucker's Simply Fruit, to use as filling for cupcakes. I use to make a raspberry filling that never quite turned out the same consistency and it took forever to get the seeds out. Now I just go to the store and get whatever fruit flavor I want, smiling the entire time because I know that I won't have a sticky raspberry mess to clean up later.

I like to fill my bags in a glass. All you do is put the bag (with the tip already inserted) into a drinking glass and fold the excess down on the outside. Now you are ready to easily fill up the bag without getting filling or icing all over the top and sides of the bag. Again, less mess and easier clean up.

I used a Wilton 1M tip to frost these cupcakes (from that decorating kit I was talking about). It is a large tip with an open star. All you have to do is start in the middle, do a big swirl to cover the top of the cupcake and then do a second layer on top of the first. The key is to use consistent pressure and don't stop moving until you are done icing the cupcake. 

I made these cupcakes for my in-law's anniversary. Those are some chocolate toppers that I came up with & luckily they worked out. They are super easy to make and they add some fun flair to the cupcake. All you have to do is melt some chocolate (I used Ghirardelli chocolate chips and follow the package instructions for how to melt.) You could use a tip with a bag to make these but I just put them in a freezer bag and cut a little off of one corner. Make whatever designs you want on a sheet of wax paper or foil. I stuck these in the refrigerator for a couple of hours and then put them on the cupcakes before I served them.

Do you like to decorate cupcakes? I wish I had more excuses to make them so I could try new tips, toppers, and flavor combinations.