Summer birthday parties, backyard barbecues and other celebrations are about to get a whole lot more colorful, thanks to these tie-dye cupcakes!
Not only is tie dye super fun during the summertime, it’s also very trendy at the moment. Even Starbucks is releasing a Tie-Dye Frappuccino for a limited time. So, you’re sure to seem very hip when you serve these up to your guests — even if they are only a bunch of 8-year-olds. “Cool parent” points await!
Thankfully, despite their multi-colored intricacies, these treats are not difficult to make, so you definitely don’t have to be a pro baker with a stand mixer and the whole shebang to pull this off. In fact, this recipe from Betty Crocker points out that this can be whipped up easily in your kitchen with little more than a Betty Crocker white cake mix, white frosting and gel or paste food colors.
Follow along with the instructions, and you’ll wind up with tie-dye cupcakes that are almost too mesmerizingly pretty to eat.
You’ll start by making the cake batter as directed on the box and then dividing the batter evenly among six bowls. Add a different food color to each bowl. The recipe recommends using red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple — but you can really get creative with the colors you use in this step!
Place a spoonful of each different colored batter into the sections of a muffin tin before sliding these multi-colored beauties into the oven to bake.
You’ll take a similar approach with the frosting. Divide the frosting into three bowls, dying each one a different color. The recipe suggests trying red, yellow and blue. The next step is crucial for making sure the colors don’t mix together when frosting the final cupcakes and is a genius trick you can employ whenever you’re dealing with different colored frostings (say, around Christmastime!) — refrigerate frostings for about 30 minutes.
Now comes the moment of truth! Using a piping bag and 6-star tip (or, you know, making do with a Ziploc bag with the tip cut off like most of us do!), fill with with spoonfuls of each of the frostings, placing the spoonfuls side by side. Frost cupcake in a clockwise motion starting from the outer edge and working to form a peak at the top.
And now you have some tie-dye cupcakes that are just as delicious to look at as they are to eat!
This story originally appeared on Simplemost. Checkout Simplemost for other great tips and ideas to make the most out of life.
