Frosting Tips & A Vanilla Butter Frosting Recipe

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Today I’m thinking about birthdays. About this time next year I’ll be celebrating the 1st birthday of my baby boy. Last summer, when I was battling serious pregnancy-sickness, I somehow managed to pull off 5 family birthdays within a 7 week period. What a whirlwind!

I want to share with you a few of my frosting and cupcake tips, as well as my favorite frosting recipe. (All these pics are from last summer.)

Let’s start with the frosting recipe. I use the butter cream frosting recipe my grandmother used. It is simple, delicious, and perfect! I am not a professional cake decorator, but I do like things to taste good, so this is my go-to frosting recipe for pretty much everything.

You can buy a large pack of plastic icing applicator bags in the party supply section at Walmart. I use these often for icing, as well as things like funnel cake batter or storing frozen pancake batter. I’ve taken the frustration out of filling them by using a drinking glass. I line the glass with the plastic applicator bag, pulling over the edges. I spoon the icing or batter into the bag while it is secure in the drinking glass. Look closely, the bag is a little hard to see in this picture.

Then it is super easy to pull the edges up, twist, and secure with a rubber-band. Easy peasy! Homemade frosting, ready to go!

We made lots of colors to make decorating fun!

All important butterfly colors were represented. All we have to do is snip the tip off the icing applicator bags and we are good to go.

My little princess takes her helper duties very seriously!

For one birthday party we made cupcakes as the party favor. I found these cute cupcake boxes with a viewing window on top. The icing is just purple icing piped onto the top of the cupcake starting in the center and circling out. Even a child can do it! She may not love cake, but she still wanted to decorate cupcakes for her friends. (We didn’t do cake AT the party, which wasn’t as weird as it sounds.)

Cupcake tip: use a cookie scoop for your cupcake batter. It helps the wrappers not get messy and helps all the cupcakes be uniform in size.

In our family, we have the tradition of everyone helping decorate their own birthday cake. It has been fun to see the progression of the cakes over the years and it is a favorite part of birthday celebrations for my girls.

My big girl took her cake-making very seriously!

There you go – all you need to know to (1) make good frosting, (2) fill icing bags the frustration-free way, and (3) fill up your cupcake papers uniformly. You’re welcome!