This post is part of my Cooking 101 Series!
Welcome to Cupcakes 102: All About Frosting! This is part 2 of my 3-part series all about cupcakes. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out Cupcakes 101: 10 Tips to Bake the Perfect Cupcake, Cupcakes 103: 14 Ways to Decorate Cupcakes Like a Pro, and Cupcakes 104: How to Store and Freeze Cupcakes! Now that we’ve mastered the cupcakes themselves, it’s time to move on to frosting! Which is probably the best part of the whole cupcake experience.
Pictured: Lemon Vanilla Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting
There are SO MANY OPTIONS when it comes to frosting your cupcakes. Personally, I have three go-tos: Vanilla Buttercream, Chocolate Buttercream, and Chocolate Fudge Frosting. If it’s a special cupcake, like my Pumpkin Ale Cupcakes, I’ll switch up the frosting and add fresh fruit, maple flavoring, or a bit of liquor (WOOT).
With any frosting, it’s important to pay close attention to consistency. If you’re planning on piping the frosting onto cupcakes, your frosting needs to be stiff and able to hold its shape. When you mix, take a spatula and pull it through the frosting to form some stiff peaks. If the peaks hold without falling over, the frosting is probably thick enough to pipe. Fix too-thin frosting by mixing in more powdered sugar a bit at a time.
Is your frosting ready? Good. Let’s start piping those cupcakes!
Pictured: Roasted Peach Muffins. With frosting. Cuz I’m cool like that.
PS – Special shoutout to Kyle for being my super awesome hand model in all of the action pictures! You da best.
How to Frost a Cupcake Like a Pro:
The first (and super-duper important!) step to achieving professional-looking cupcakes is to master the art of frosting them. I use Wilton equipment for all of my baking and decorating – in my experience, the price and quality just can’t be beat. (I’ve also heard great things about Ateco products, though I’ve never used them myself). I use my favorite Wilton 16 Inch Pastry Bag
To fill the pastry bag, fit it with your pastry tip of choice (I used a Wilton 1M
Hold the bag in your hand at the fold – this will give you the best support when you spoon your frosting into it! Attach your frosting tip of choice and you’re ready to fill your bag with frosting! (I used my vanilla buttercream in these photos).
Scoop up a heaping spoonful of frosting, and use your spoon or spatula to push it all the way down to the tip of the pastry bag.
Then, use the hand holding the pastry bag to squeeze the bag around the spoon and pull, to make sure all of the frosting gets into the bag.
Pull the spoon out and repeat until the bag is full up to the fold.
When you’ve filled the pastry bag up to the fold, pull the top half back up and run your hand down the bag to squeeze out any air bubbles between clumps of frosting. Then twist the top tightly so that no frosting will escape when you apply pressure to the bag.
To frost cupcakes, point the tip of the pastry bag on an outer edge and apply even pressure to the frosting-filled part of the bag with one hand while using the other hand to keep the top of the pastry bag tightly twisted. Move in a circle around the outer edges and work your way to the center of the cupcake, releasing pressure gently when you reach the center to leave a nice frosting peak.
Ta-Da! A beautifully frosted cupcake. Looks super profesh, no? And it took all of thirty seconds. Pastry bags are great for beautifying your cupcakes, but they are also the unsung heroes of cupcake time-saving: a pastry bag makes it SO easy to frost a large amount of cupcakes quickly and prettily.
Frosting Tips:
There are so many frosting tips available now that it can be hard to tell which one does what. When I frost cupcakes, I have three go-to tips:
The Wilton 1M (Used in the frosting how-to photos above) is my most-used tip for cupcake frosting. It creates a nice, thick swirl and looks very uniform (read: mistake-free) no matter how quickly you are frosting.
The Wilton 2D tip is very similar to the 1M, but it is a little more sensitive to the pressure you apply while frosting and can create a few different thicknesses of swirl. Using the same amount of pressure as the photo above, I got a slightly thinner, tighter swirl with the 2D:
The last tip I use for cupcake decorating is the Wilton 2A. This is a very standard tip – just a large, round shape – and it’s great for using with elaborate toppers and ganache that would overpower swirly frosting.
The great thing about these three frosting tips is that Wilton makes similar shapes in a variety of sizes, so you can achieve the same effects on almost any scale. For example, all of these tips will create a shape like the 1M:
And many Wilton tip sets also include a mini version of the 2D:
As well as several tips in the 2A-tip shape family:
Hungry for more cupcake tips? Check out Cupcakes 101, Cupcakes 103: 14 Ways to Decorate Cupcakes Like a Pro, and Cupcakes 104: How to Store and Freeze Cupcakes!
First I read “10 Tips to Bake the Perfect Cupcake”. There it states how important it is to frost the WHOLE cupcake to prevent drying. Then on this post, in all the photos above, the frosting is not at all close to the edges. Why the conflicting images and information!! Baking for some… can be hard enough.
How do I stop the center’s falling in please
My daughter (she’s 9) and I are making 100 cupcakes for my in-laws anniversary party this weekend. I am so happy I found this website. This whole Cupcake 101 and so on has been a huge help. I’ve been worried and overwhelmed (especially since we need to bake the cupcakes Friday and frost them Saturday for a Sunday party). I feel so much more confident now. Thank you so much!!!
Hi Tiffany, thank you so much! Glad to be of help.
Thank you so much do you have any suggestion on butter cream frosted cup cakes for catering in hot weather if I keep them in thr refrigerator take them out 2 hours before serving it will be ok?
when I tried it, a was like oh my God I’m I the one doing it…
thanks.
Thank you Gilbert.
Thank you so much for these wonderful tips.
Big hugs from Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.
Thank you Deloris!
I love making cupcakes! I wanted a whiter frosting so I used Whittaker white vanilla. The frosting had a horrible plastic taste. Any suggestions?
I haven’t used Whittaker vanilla before so I can’t say for sure if that’s what caused it, but it may well be one of the ingredients that’s the culprit behind that plastic taste! I’ve had great luck with Kerrygold or Vermont Creamery butters in frosting (others can definitely taste a little off!) and Simply Organic, Aldi, or Penzey’s vanilla extracts. Hope that helps!
i’m just learning on this thank you so much
Your post is one of the most elaborate yet simple post I’ve read on cupcake making.. so so helpful for beginners like me. I am going to keep all the pointers in mind and hope my cupcakes turn out as yum as yours look 😊 ! Thanks from Dubai
Hello! So glad it helped you out, thank you!
I have a question. If i wanted to make a vanilla-raspberry buttercream, and cooked some frozen raspberries down, could i swirl that through the buttercream without causing it to break? Or put it along the edge of a piping bag to have it naturally swirl as i frosted?
I am making cupcakes for my daughter’s birthday on Saturday afternoon. Would it be best to bake them on Friday night, and then frost them on Saturday early afternoon? I don’t want the frosting to get all melted. Please let me know