Vintage Inspired Cupcakes

Last night I was up baking cupcakes for my daughter’s teacher who is leaving on maternity leave today. Every time I have a baking project I always say to myself that I don’t want to be up until midnight working on these things. Sure enough, I was!

I wanted to keep these really simple.   Since she doesn’t know what she’s having yet,  I knew I wanted to have both blue and pink cupcakes. I love the combination of dark brown with soft shades of pink and blue so they had to be chocolate!

I’ve been very inspired by vintage design lately so I wanted the colors of the icing to be a certain shade of pink and blue. To start I made the icing by mixing together 2 sticks of UNSALTED Land O Lakes butter and 2 cups of confectioners sugar.  Mmmmm – I just LOVE homemade icing!!

Now as you know, butter isn’t pure white so in this case for a vintage feel that actually helped me. I also added a splash of vanilla extract for additional flavor as well as to slightly tint the icing even more.

I like to use the gel icing colors and for pale colors you really don’t need a lot. I also started out with light colors. These are the ones I used:

When I mixed the blue, at first it looked a little greenish/gray so I had to add more until it looked blue. This one is a bit deeper in color than I would have liked but at least it looks blue!

The pink was really sweet! i was happy how those came out.

The teacher was really surprised and the kids were thrilled to be able to eat cupcakes at 8:30 in the morning!

I think these cupcake color would be sweet for a shabby chic baby shower or any vintage inspired event. If I had more time I would have created cupcake toppers and possibly cupcake wrappers.

It was fun to break out my cake decorating supplies!

Have you baked anything fun or delicious lately?