Cupcake Flower Basket / Cupcake Bouquet

You know I like gifting baked goods when we're invited for lunches/dinners.  This time I made a cupcake flower basket with eggless vanilla cupcakes and vanilla buttercream frosting.

Cupcake bouquet is a very popular gift these days.  I didn't have a vase and styrofoam ball on hand to make a bouquet.  I have plenty of thermocol sheets though (because I use them for food photography).  So I cut out round thermocol sheets to fit the basket and layered them until it reached the top.

Some people like to decorate their cupcakes and then attach to the styrofoam.  I prefer vice-versa when I want to pipe simple roses or hydrangeas because they can be done without having to rotate the cupcake and without ruining the frosting while placing and attaching to the styrofoam.  Since this was a flat surface and not a round ball, it also gave me chance to place cupcakes without attaching them to first see how many I could fit in.

By attaching I mean using toothpicks to fix each cupcake from underneath to the thermocol (or styrofoam).  The toothpick should be somewhere halfway in the styrofoam and the cupcake just so the cupcake doesn't move and is fixed at one place.  After I tried placing cupcakes on the sheet without the toothpicks at first and saw that there was empty space between sheet and basket (because I didn't cut a bigger round of thermocol), I taped some light yellow tissue paper all around inside the basket.  I chose the light yellow because I had these pieces pre-cut from another project and because this light color would go along with the bright color of roses and leaves.

Place all the cupcakes along with toothpicks similarly and close to each other so there is not much white thermocol showing from underneath (if there is, that's how you would pipe the leaves around to hide any whites from below).  Then pipe the flower you wish - whether you want roses or hydrangea.  If you want to make hibiscus, sunflower, or other flowers that need rotating the cupcake, it would make sense to decorate them first and then affix.  Pipe the leaves in the end and finish it off.

And here my roses on the cupcake flower basket are ready.  I used Wilton's color gel burgundy for the roses and kelly green for the leaves.  Wilton nozzle closed star 1M was used to pipe the roses and basic leaf tip 352 was used to pipe the leaves.  Basic vanilla buttercream frosting was used on both.

Hope this was helpful.  Go on, make one cupcake bouquet or flower basket for your friend's birthday, a dinner invite, or a special occasion next time.

Enjoy.
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