Onesie Cupcakes for a Girl Baby Shower

It has been a really, really long time since I have busted out my cake decorating skills. About three or so years ago,  I took cake decorating classes from Wilton at Michael's.  I did all but one of the classes and that was for gum paste flowers. I don't ever plan to make wedding cakes, so I don't regret not doing that! In my office, I'm the resident baker, so when we were planning to have a baby shower for my co-worker, I was asked to do cupcakes.

Originally, I had planned to do something really simple and just get baby shower cake decorations from Michael's and just put them on the cupcakes.  But when I went, they were out of all the things.  Apparently, they had a buy one get one 50% off sale and got cleaned out.  So, in my usual Sarah fashion, I thought, "Oh hey! I can just do outlines of onesies!" That seemed simple to me. It always seems simpler than it actually is.

I ultimately decided to make white cupcakes with white buttercream frosting.  I baked them in white liners, then dropped into these cupcakes cups that I picked up at Michael's. For the decoration, I decided to outline baby onesies in royal icing. I did that instead of fondant because I would have had to freeze fondant and I just don't have that kind of room in my freezer.

For the cake, I used my favorite White Almond Sour Cream Cake recipe. The recipe is for wedding cakes, so I half it.  Half the recipe makes 36 cupcakes.  I've made this recipe so many times and it really is one of the best and my favorites.  The cake comes out evenly and white, no browning. It's also a little bit denser, which is great if you are using fondant or other heavy cake decorating materials.  For the buttercream, I actually use the Wilton Class Buttercream recipe.  I use water instead of milk.  When I was taking classes, Wilton used straight shortening but they've now switched to half butter and half shortening, which is what I use. You'll need two recipes of buttercream for these cupcakes. You really only need about 1.5 recipes, but I just go ahead and make the full two and add buttercream to other things in life, like cookies and graham crackers.

To make the onesies, I used royal icing.  You can make your own royal icing or you can pick up a premixed box from Michael's, which is what I did. Royal icing requires sifted sugar which I wasn't in the mood to do. I used one box and it was plenty of icing.

I found this outline of a onesie on Pinterest:

http://patternuniverse.com/download/onesie-pattern/

I printed out the outline at 25% percent and used it as my template.  I placed it under parchment paper and traced the designs with the royal icing on the parchment paper.

We had decided that the colors for the shower would be pink and purple, so I mixed those colors and did half the onesie outlines in pink and the other half in purple.

I did some as solids and some with designs (polka dots, stripes, chevrons, etc).

Make sure when making your royal icing that you have the right consistency.  I made it too thick the first time and my hand was cramping really badly while doing the first few outlines.  I thinned it out some and it was perfect.  You thin it out by adding more water, just be careful because a little goes a long way with royal icing!  Once the outlines and designs were made, I thinned out the icing even more to "flood" the designs.  For flooding, you want to be able to drip some of the icing back in to the bowl of icing and it disappear in about 10 seconds.

I let the onesies dry overnight and the next morning I loaded them into some trays I had.  When I first started cake decorating, I bought all these supplies and I don't ever get a chance to use them.  So I was pretty excited to finally use those guys again.

I made the onesies on Monday and they lasted until the shower on Friday.  I made the cupcakes and buttercream Thursday night. I had really grand plans of doing some baking one night, then making the buttercream the next and then decorating the last night, but that didn't happen.

I piped the buttercream on the cupcakes Thursday night and did a test run on them for decorating.  I was really happy with how they came out!

My friend that professionally decorates cakes recommended that I wait to decorate the rest until right before the party.  I'm glad she did because when I came down the next morning, the onesies had melted in to my test cupcakes!

A tip and warning - when making these and putting on the actual cupcakes, be super careful! I broke about five pieces.  I had extras, so I was okay, but they are really fragile.  As you can see, I ended up with about three naked cupcakes.  Make yourself some extras or, if you have room in your freezer and time, make them with fondant instead.

These turned out really cute, I got tons of compliments and I'm proud to say I still know how to do this stuff And now I'm good for the next six months to not do any real cake decorating! I'm sticking to my day job!