Tie Dyed Cupcakes

Tie-Dyed Cupcake

My daughter's bestie was having a birthday, and her mom asked if I could help out with some cupcakes. I said of course, because we all love the girl so much. It also gives me "blog fodder" :), total win-win! Anyway, in the past, I had seen an adorable cupcake that was multicolored on Pinterest. . .Some people called it rainbow, others called it tie-dyed. I have made them before and put it on Pinterest, but I just took a picture of it and typed the directions below. On this blog post, I will give step by step pictures and instructions on how it's done. It isn't just the icing, but the cake is "tie-dyed" too.

I started off really simply with this cake since it takes just a little bit of extra work. I used a strawberry cake mix and I doctored it up just a bit. Instead of water, I used 1 can of strawberry nectar and a little water to equal my liquid content. I also used 2 cake mixes.

My Ingredients

After I made my cake, I divided the batter into 5 different bowls so I could dye my batter. Because I used 2 mixes, I put about 2 cups in each bowl. If you chose to do a different amount of colors, the cup total would vary per bowl. This is the part where you get creative and decide how many and what colors you want to use. For example, I will do this for my son's birthday in a couple of months and use browns and greens and make it look kind of a camouflage look.

My batter divided. You can also see that I have my oven set to 350.

Then I tinted my batter with Wilton gel colors. I used the blue and pink to get the purple color.

My colors

My tinted batter

Then I began to color by color, fill my cupcake liners.

Green

Then a spoonful of pink

The yellow-orange color

The blue color

The purple color

Since I was making 24 cupcakes, I had a little leftover to make a cake with it, that turned out pretty cute.

The cake :)

After about 20 minutes of baking at 350, this is how they looked when they came out. They were a beautiful jewel toned color, that actually reminded me a bit of the Mardi Gras colors.

The baked cupcakes.

I did these the day before and covered them in a cling wrap. I love being able to do things like this in little hitches. It makes it seem like no work at all.

My next step was to prepare the butter cream icing that I had made earlier in the week. The great thing about butter cream icing is that it lasts up to two weeks in the refrigerator. This is another one of those things you can do ahead and it saves you tons of time on party day. I tripled my usual recipe, and I made 3 different colors of the icing. Once I made the icing, I put it in a large pastry bag/piping bag, whatever you actually call them:).  I put a spoonful of the blue in first, then the pink and finally the yellow, right next to each other. What comes out is a really cool effect.

Do you see how each color is separated, but still in at the same time?

I used a Wilton #1M tip to pipe the little cupcake swirl onto the tie-dyed cupcakes.

The Tie Dye Cupcake

This is what the inside looked like after it was all said and done.

The inside of the cupcake.

I had a little icing leftover, so I made a little 4 inch cake and piped colorful stars all over it.

I took this from my phone, so the photo isn't as good, but still adorable (in my opinion anyway).

So I took these to the party and they were a huge hit. I am so glad the Birthday Princess liked them.

The cupcakes and the cake together.