Creative Crumbs Nashville: Woodland Cupcakes Part 1

Happy Sunday! Like I mentioned last week, this is apparently the season for baby showers. But, this week, its cupcakes! I think these are seriously the cutest cupcakes I’ve ever made!

They were for a woodland themed baby shower. The client sent me a link to their Pinterest board so I could get some ideas. There were lots of owl designs, some acorns, burlap, twigs, toadstools, etc. It was the perfect mix of cute and rustic. But I didn’t want to just copy one of the cupcakes design they had picked for inspiration, so I sketched a few ideas that I thought captured their theme too.

They ended up picking all three! So they had a variety of designs which looked fantastic the way they presented them.

The first ones I made were the owl cupcakes. I used a technique called “flooding.” Flooding is traditionally used to decorate sugar cookies, but I used it to make two-dimensional designs that would stand up in the icing of the cupcakes.

With the flooding technique, you start by piping a border around your design with royal icing – like the little guy in the middle here:

Then you use a thinner icing to “flood” the design – like all the other owls above.

Since the second icing is thinner, it flows into the edges of the design and leaves a perfectly smooth finish. This initial layer of icing needs to dry for at least 12 hours before you add any of the details.

So, once the brown icing had cured, I added the white for the eyes using the same process: pipe the border, flood the middle.

After the white icing had dried for several hours, I added the green for the owls’ belly.

But for this part, I didn’t let the green icing dry before adding the blue “feathers” - you can see the blue on the top row. By piping the blue on top of the green while it was still soft, the blue sinks into the icing and makes it smooth.

Lastly, once everything was set, I added the finishing touches: black dots on the eyes, and the yellow beak and wings.