Back to School Apple Cupcakes

Where has our summer gone? I cannot believe it is almost time to send these kids back to school. I'm Rachel Tel. And today I'm gonna be uh teaching you how to create these adorable apple cupcakes. They're super cute. They're in these red little tins. So it looks like almost a 3d apple but not quite. Um but they're a lot of fun to create. One of the things I would encourage you to do is if you haven't already download the template, there's a link in our profile there for you to download not only an apple template that we're gonna be using in order to pipe these cupcakes with butter cream. Uh but there's also a gift tag just in case you wanna send these along as a back to school treat, you can cut these out and uh you can place them in these adorable little boxes with the gift tag. It's a perfect treat for the kids, for the teachers um for just about anyone. So why don't we go ahead and get started? One of the first things uh that you will need to do is obviously bake off your cupcakes. Now your cupcakes can be in something like these metal tins, which I really like mostly because they're sturdier than our paper liners, but feel free to use the paper liners as well. Truly, whatever uh cupcake recipe you have whatever liner you have any of these things will work just fine. And if you are super creative and you like to work with cookies, you can use the same technique on your cookies as well. You can either use a circle or if you happen to have a template for an apple cut out or if you wanna use this template, there's lots of different ways to do this on cookies as well. So this is a versatile project. It's um it's basically a butter cream transfer which means that we're gonna take our template, something that we're gonna uh pipe over top of. And uh we're gonna do that with butter cream and you can do that with a Swiss meringue butter cream, a regular um American style butter cream, Italian butter cream. Any of them will work well for you. And then on top of that, you're gonna need a little bit of wax paper, a board or a cookie sheet to stabilize it. And then of course, your uh masking tape as well. Um So what you wanna do is put your template down and you can use a little bit of tape just to keep it in place. And then of course, we wanna put our uh little piece of wax paper on top as well. All right. And what you're gonna do is just tape your saran wrap in place. And then um we are gonna work from basically from front to back. So whatever you're gonna see uh from the front of the cupcake is what you wanna pipe first. So in this case, we wanna make sure that we see white where we have that little shadow or highlight in this case. Um And then we are gonna pipe our red over top of that and then we're actually gonna wait and pipe that leaf on a little later just so you can have a little bit more dimension and then of course, we'll have your little stem as well. Now, the stem you can do out of butter cream if you'd like or you can use modeling chocolate, which is what I'm gonna use today. I like a little texture in there but of whatever works best for you. Uh So let's grab our white butter cream first. This is just a round tip. It happens to be a number five. You can use a much thinner tip. So you would want to go smaller like a number two or number three. but any size tip will work here and you're just gonna go straight up and down and you're gonna let it fall to the surface just like that. And then you're just gonna pipe a tiny little dot As well. So this is a really easy template to follow. This isn't a very complicated design. Uh Certainly you could be more complicated with your designs if you'd like. And that just really would depend on what type of design you're doing. But this is uh just something easy to be able to show you the technique and it doesn't take long, which is really great. It's a nice quick project. Uh I know back to school time is a really busy time. And so I just don't uh I don't have a lot of extra time on my hands. Um And so I like having quick easy projects to create. Uh especially if it's a gift. Sometimes I just don't have the time to really create uh uh in depth projects. If one of the things about um the template piece of it is you wanna make sure each of your pieces are exactly where you want them before you put the next layer on. And so I'm just using a, excuse me, a little something in my throat here. I'm just using a paintbrush and I have uh the butter cream sitting here and I'm just going to uh brush that butter cream right into place. So that's kind of the beauty of the wax paper is you can kind of push this into each of the locations. So if you didn't pipe perfectly, um you can certainly uh certainly do that with the paint brush. It just kind of moves things into place for you also, if you have too much, this is a great time to just kind of get rid of that piece. So I had piped just a little bit too much there and it didn't, uh, didn't come off in time. All right. So once you have your white, uh, little highlights in place, you actually wanna toss this in the refrigerator, um, give this a few minutes to firm up. If you pipe directly over this right now, it's actually gonna spread out and that butter cream isn't gonna uh hold its line and it's gonna look really mushy and it just isn't gonna look great. So you wanna make sure you either pop this in the fridge or the freezer for a few minutes, make sure that this white butter cream is nice and firm and then you'll be able to pop uh the red on top of it and it's just fine and it stays where it's supposed to, it's stuck to that wax paper. So it's not going anywhere, which is really great. Um, for the sake of the tutorial, I'm just gonna go ahead and pipe over this, but I've already uh firmed up the apples um, before the class. So, uh, this will make it really easy for you guys at least to see what we're gonna to do. Um, but you're just gonna use. So this is a one a it's a fairly large tip. It's probably about a half inch or so. And it's um it's got a nice solid uh circle and the butter cream. And when it comes out, you, you wanna stay really low to your template and you wanna keep it as flat as you can, you can always uh trim this up with your spatula. So don't stress if you're, if you're not great at piping, don't worry, but you're basically gonna go straight up and down and you're gonna squeeze, but you're gonna stay nice and low right on the surface of your template. And what this does is it allows the butter cream just to kind of fan out just a little. But if you were to pipe, I'll, I'll pipe here just so you can see if you were to hover too high. You're gonna get these big huge dollops and that's a little too big for the transfer technique that we're doing. So this is a no, you just wanna stay nice and low and close to the surface and it just sort of flattens it out. Now, if you struggle at all with uh piping and it doesn't look perfect. Don't stress. I've got lots of little tips for you. Once we freeze these and pull them back out, we'll be able to make them perfectly smooth. Um The backside is not quite as important as the front. So you, if you have some big dollops of butter cream and you wanna flatten them out, you certainly can. This is not the front of your cupcake though. So, no worries. If this doesn't look perfect, you're good to go. It's nice and easy. All right. So one other way that you can do this again, if you're not a piper, you don't like piping butter cream, you'd rather use your spatula. You can use the same technique as I'm using here just by piping basically a dollop and then using your spatula to put it into place. And that certainly works as well. So, you know, depending upon what your preferences are, this type of technique can be really done a lot of different ways. Um I have a tendency to uh use my piping bag and tips um to the best of their ability and uh often times it'll uh just not come out the way that I want it anyway. So then I grab my spatula and kind of move it into place again. You can also use your paint brush just to clean up your edges, kind of move things into place. Don't be afraid uh in this situation to move your butter cream around because we're working on wax paper. If you make an error, you can just scrape it off. It's not a big deal. You can start all over. If we were working on the surface of a cookie, we can do the same thing. You can just kind of wipe it away. But if you're working on the top surface of a cake that's already got, let's say white butter cream on it. Um Then you don't have the ability to kind of move things where you want it to be. You are kind of stuck with what you put on there, especially if you're using a bright color like red on a white surface. So that kind of makes it trickier uh when you are piping directly on cakes and that's why I like using the transfer method. Um It works great for the top surface of cakes, but in this case, we're obviously gonna use cupcakes. It works great for that too because you get the design, the shape, everything that you need right here. So you can make all your corrections and then we're gonna chill this and when we flip it out, if there are any imperfections, they'll be on the top surface which we can easily fix. So let me pop this in the fridge and grab the other one. Oh, all right. Sorry guys. Ok. So these have been chilling in the refrigerator and you can see that I've got my shapes. I also have the little white uh pieces so these won't move now. So you can just pipe right over top of it and it's gonna stay put. I'm gonna flip it over just so you can kind of see what we're working with. So if you uh had a really light piece of uh butter cream, I'm gonna go ahead and put it down even though not what you need to do here. But um if you have a piece of butter cream that is really soft, let's pipe that. So you can kind of see what happens if it's really soft. And I were to put the, the red over top of it like I did here. This would just smooth and it would just kind of flatten out. So I wanted to show you that's why that uh refrigeration piece is so important because otherwise you end up with white that is just spread out. It doesn't look as nice. And um, the, the cold butter cream holds its shape and really just comes out beautifully. Ok. So hopefully my butter cream hasn't stuck. Excellent. It hasn't, um, the key to our cupcakes and this transfer is really having the ability to flip over the cold piece right on top of the cupcake. So, um, let's talk cupcakes for a second before we uh flip it on. You can see that sometimes your cupcakes dome. So they just have that little poof on it. And normally I wouldn't stress over that. I would just pipe right over top of it, um, makes it nice and easy. But when we're using something that is flat, if I were to put that on top of something that's domed, it doesn't really fit very well. You have exposed cake, it's not quite what you need. So, uh my uh solution to that is just simply use a serrated knife and run it right across the top edge, makes it nice and simple. We'll just get rid of that top piece, but it just makes it nice and simple to and, and nice and flat, uh, allows you to use the cupcake and the liner hone honestly, just the liner to be able to make it nice and smooth. Now, if you are concerned at all that you don't have enough butter cream, um your, your uh template wasn't big enough for the cupcake liner you chose. You can absolutely just put a little bit of butter cream around the edge, use your spatula and just smooth it to the edges. Ok. So, you know, it depends uh a little bit on how much butter cream you wanna use, how much um space you have as well. That's the other kind of uh piece here. If your cupcake is uh baked all the way up to the top edge and you don't have any room for butter cream. Um and this template fits perfectly, just go ahead and plop it on my show. You both so that you can see the differences. Uh but this one obviously has a little bit of butter cream. And the easiest way to do this is to just flip your cupcake right onto the buttercream surface itself, you're gonna flip it over and then peel it off. And so now you have this really cute apple design. That's right on top of the butter cream. If you are using a Swiss meringue butter cream and it's been sitting for a while, sometimes it will develop bubbles, just whip it up really well before you pipe it onto your uh parchment and you won't have any air bubbles. But if you happen to don't stress, just use the edge of your um spatula here and it's gonna take away all those little air bubbles. And if you need to add a little bit more butter cream to the surface to make it smooth, you certainly can. It will fill in all of those gaps. But Swiss meringue buttercream is one of those that really um had it comes to temperature very quickly. So you wanna be careful that you don't uh touch it too much because otherwise it'll start to kind of ooze and go in different directions and you're gonna lose the shape that you just piped. So that's the other thing to keep in mind. Let me do this other one just so you can see why I like to use the butter cream on the surface of the cupcake. You again, you're just flipping it over. So you can see there's a little excess cake that's showing. And this is also, this is kind of like my um my wrong cupcake. This is the one I wanna show you how to fix things with. So you've got a nice smooth texture on this one. This one you can see, I very clearly piped just a tube. I wasn't very uh flat to the surface. It didn't spread the way that it normally would, but that's not a problem. We can fix this. This is an easy solution. Um, all you're gonna do is put a little bit of butter cream right on the surface of the cold butter cream and you can just fill in any gaps that you might have. So, depending upon how big those gaps are, you might need, need a little more or a little less. And one of the other things, um it might be hard to see but the white, it, the, when I put the red over top, it didn't snug right into that white line. That's not a problem either. I'm actually gonna put red right over it, which I know is scary for a lot of people. But if you just very carefully scrape that back, you fill in any gaps that are there with your red butter cream. And it allows that white butter cream to show through once you wipe it back off. And that's because this is a cold cupcake. The icing is cold, it allows me to really work with it and get a smooth surface. So don't, don't stress if you're not a perfect piper. This is kind of the beauty of this particular technique that you can really kind of play with the icing and get it to where you want it to be, even if your piping skills aren't perfect. Um, the other thing that you're gonna see in this particular cupcake is that there's sort of some striations in the butter cream and that is a matter of using a cold butter cream versus a warm butter cream. This, um, basically what happened is this was in the refrigerator and the icing that was in the tube was very, uh, cold and the, the whole bag was cold initially, obviously, but because of the metal tip that was in there, um, that icing stayed cold and the rest, so this warmed up faster. And so when I went to first pipe, my apples, my butter cream was pretty stiff when it first came out. And so it has a different color and texture when it's warm versus when it's cold. And um, interestingly enough, especially a Swiss buttercream, uh the Swiss meringue doesn't take color well, unless it's been heated. And so you can kind of see the difference between a cold butter cream and what that color looks like versus a warm butter cream. And it, it really is just, it's the sa this is the same exact butter cream. There's no difference in the butter cream except for the temperature. So this is one of those, um, one of those times when there's a lot to learn because if you're, if you're piping and you don't understand like I put the same amount of red icing. It was all the same batch and you, you come up with these striations. That's probably why the temperature of your butter cream was probably just different as you were piping it. And like I said, I know that my butter cream was cool when I first piped. But what was inside? That tip was really, really cold. So that's just something to think about when you're doing your piping and know that even the heat of your hand with a Swiss meringue butter cream and even with a regular American style butter cream, it doesn't happen as fast with American, but it definitely happens with Swiss. Just the heat of your hand as you're piping can change the color of your icing. So just be mindful of that as you're uh working with your cupcakes and know that, you know, you, you could start with a really light um apple at the beginning and then end up with a really dark apple on the other end. And that's mostly just because of the temperature of your hand. So if you're concerned about that, you can always wear gloves if you just typically have really hot hands, um, definitely wear gloves. It'll help insulate your hands a little bit and keep the butter cream from changing temperature so quickly. And so the next color that I have for you, this is a green, but it's mixed. I have a little bit of a limey yellow color and then a darker like leaf green and this is a leaf tip. This is a 352. It's a very common leaf tip and it is styled um the way that I like to describe it is as a bird's beak. So let's look at the bird's beak really quick so we can understand what's happening. So there's a little bit of a a beak here. It's kind of like an open mouth and the way that you wanna use that is so that the mouth is open. So if you turn it to the side, you're gonna get a more vertical um exposure where if you turn it uh where the beak is open, then you're gonna get uh basically a flat leaf that pipes out. So the uh the way that this works is as you uh squeeze, it's actually gonna create an elongated tube. But if you put your tip down on a surface and leave it there and let it build, that's how you're gonna be able to create the leaf. So there's AAA trick basically to making this leaf tip work. Otherwise, if you just set this down and I just pull, I just get this really long tube that has like a line in it. But if you uh squeeze onto the surface and push it creates just a much uh wider uh ruffly leaf. So that's what you wanna do on your cupcake. So let's, I did that one already. Let's turn this one here and depending upon which way you want your leaf to show, um I can switch hands when I'm piping. But if you can't just turn your cupcake, but you see how it just builds, that's your goal. You want it to build up, give it some texture, give it a little bit of depth um when you're piping. So that's just um a fun little tip to use. I love that leaf tip. It's useful for a lot of things, not just leaves, even though it's called a leaf tip. Um but it's a lot of fun to work with. And then uh one of the last things that you wanna do is be able to add a stem. And again, if you wanna pipe this with a brown butter cream, you can, I'm just using some modeling chocolate. It's my favorite. Um I, I love uh satin, I's new chocolate, uh modeling chocolate. They have a really great product. It's nice and firm. It holds its shape, it's great. Um But what I've done is just put a couple of different layers of brown. So there's some light brown in it, there's some dark brown and I'm just gonna roll it in my hands first to get it started and then go ahead and put it down on the surface and just use your fingers to roll it out into a log. Now, you could also use um a little fondant smoother that'll keep it nice and straight but because this is like a branch or a stem, it doesn't have to be perfectly flat. We, we want um sort of some imperfections because no stem is gonna be perfectly smooth all the way across. And then either uh just using a knife or your spatula, you just wanna cut a little section, basically like a one inch section or so. And I like using that flat end as the tip of my branch and I just give it a little bit of a curve and then you're just gonna insert it right where you piped your leaf. So just depending upon, you know, which direction you put your leaf or how um you have structured uh just kind of like where the apples place, you might wanna make a longer stem or maybe a shorter stem. Um If you're gonna use uh a box like I'm gonna use, you can go upright and really give it a lot of depth and texture, but it's just a fun, fun accent. Nice little piece of chocolate to munch on when you're eating your cupcake. Um So it's tasty too. And then uh of course, we have a template for you to put a gift tag onto your boxes. Should you wanna use this? Um And it just says a little treat to make your first day sweet. It's such a cute little saying and such a sweet um touch to any sort of gifting. Um I think you guys if you've been around and you know me. Well, I love to gift. It is, is my love language for sure. And I just love being able to put together cute little treats, little boxes. Um, I've got some clear boxes. We've got a link for you actually on the download if you wanna buy this particular box. And um, we also have the red baking cups there, so feel free to check out both of those items. They're exactly what I'm using here. Um I put a little bit of tape on the uh inside of the box just to hold my cupcake in place. So it didn't go anywhere. Um And then of course, just tying a beautiful uh bow with some pretty ribbon and then adding in your uh little piece of um the little leaf with our gift tag and you could certainly um add more accessories to this. If you wanted to put someone's name on it, you could use the same template um and put their name on the backside. If you wanted, you could print this on green paper rather than white and then you don't have any excess um white on the outside of it when you're printing. So there's a lot of fun ways to be able to use your gift tags as well. Um Let's see. And then, you know, always grab something fun that might um uh add a little extra something when you're wrapping your gifts. This is just a nice thin little ribbon and I chose thin more because you don't wanna distract from what's on the inside of the box. You wanna add a little something, but you also wanna make sure that if, especially if you're using a clear box that you can see into it, you can see what the the item is on the inside, obviously. Um But you don't want such a wide ribbon that you can't then you know, enjoy the beauty of the cupcake that's on the inside. Um And one of the other things I wanna mention too, this would be a really fun project to make with a flavored cake, like an apple spice cake. So I am always one of those. I like to think through the whole project and think about what uh might um pair well with something obviously, when you're looking at this apple cup cake, be completely fine to be a vanilla or any flavor that you would like it to be. Um But I always find it really fun to just incorporate some of the flavors of what I might making. So in this case, an apple spice cupcake or maybe you have a vanilla cupcake with like an apple pie filling on the inside um that would be really delicious too. So, um again, super easy project. Lots of fun. You could always get the kids involved as well. This is a project that very easily translates over for our younger ones who are into baking, who just wanna be a little creative as well. So I'd encourage you to get the kids in the kitchen. Um Also feel free to leave your comments and I will check back in just a little bit and answer any questions you might have. And we'll go from uh from a plain cupcake to a really cute, adorable little apple cupcake. Perfect for back to school.