Simple Cupcake Decorating Ideas

Cupcakes can make an easy-to-serve dessert for your next event. Unfortunately, the prevalence of cupcake specialty stores and cupcake cookbooks have upped the ante when it comes to cupcake design. If you can't afford to spend several hours decorating your cupcakes, you may worry that your dessert will fall flat. Simple designs can still look attractive, though. You can easily create cupcakes that look great without taking much time to add decorations. Add this to my Recipe Box.

Candy

A single piece of bulk candy on top of the cupcake adds extra sweetness as well as decoration. Match the candy to your theme or the type of frosting you use. A brightly colored gumdrop looks great against a background of white frosting. Use gummy fish with bright blue frosting for an instant undersea look. Put a peanut butter cup on top of a chocolate cupcake with peanut butter-flavored frosting.

Colored Sugar

Purchase colored sugar in the baking section of your grocery store. Choose a color that matches the theme of your event and contrasts with the frosting you've chosen. Any color can look good with white frosting, but you might want to choose green sugar for a yellow lemon-flavored frosting or purple sugar for a pink strawberry-flavored frosting. Simply shake the sugar on top of the cupcake. If you want to go a bit further, you can hold a stencil over the cupcake, which will only allow the sugar to fall in the shape you've chosen, such as a heart or flower.

Easy Animals

Using a frosting bag with different frosting tips, you can easily dot the cupcake with frosting that looks like fur. Once you've done that, use candies like jelly beans, string licorice and cookies to create the animal's face.

Cupcake Presentation

Rather than decorating individual cupcakes, think about your presentation as a whole as your decoration. For example, Disney's Family Fun website suggests frosting the cupcakes with brightly colored frosting, then attaching a string to each one and arranging them to look like a bunch of balloons. You can also use two different-colored frostings to create a design -- frost cupcakes in pink and lay them out in the shape of a heart, then use a different color to fill in the areas around the heart.