How to Decorate a Cupcake

Executive Pastry Chef Stephanie Franz shows how to decorate specialty cupcakes.

How to Decorate a Cupcake - as part of the cakes & dessert series by GeoBeats. I am going to show you how we decorate these specialty cupcakes. We are going to start off with a basic cupcake. This is a vanilla bean cupcake. You can also change the liners according to the occasion you are trying to celebrate. So now we are going to take a piping tip, and this is a small open star-tip and it is filled with our butter cream. What I am going to do is pipe little rosettes all around your cupcake. And that is our basic small rosette piping for this cupcake. Next, we are going to do the finishing touches. These are chocolate flower pedals, we make these by hand by tempering chocolate, coloring it pink, and then using a paring knife to get that spiked kind of look and then we let it harden on a mold that is at an angle. So I am going to use/grab these and start to make a flower on the cupcake out of this. So, we have our flower here, and then I am just going to take some sugar beads and put that in the center. This is our specialty chocolate flower cupcake. Now I am going to show you how to make another style of cupcake. I am going to start out with the basic cupcake again. And this time, I am going to use a bigger star-tip, open star-tip. We are going to start off by kind of building almost like a shell border, from the outside, going in. So just going and turning the cupcake as you go. Now onto the garnishes. This is a dark chocolate garnish we use, we call this the chocolate squiggle and you just stick it like that, in the cupcake. And then I like to use fresh berries; so let me go garnish this with a fresh raspberry, and then some gold sugar beads, for the top. And there you have your vanilla chocolate raspberry cupcake. So there you have your fancy cupcakes, they are all the trend nowadays, great for weddings, birthday parties, baby showers.