Sunday, January 22, 2012

Beyonce Coundown Cupcakes

First thing first, if you haven't seen Beyonce's Countdown video, you should watch.  Seperate from the following post, it's just a great video.

This video was the inspiration for my friend's cupcakes that I made yesterday.  Using a basic chocolate cake recipe and store bought frosting, I focused my energy on the design more than the cake itself.

Here's the finished product with a step-by-step after the jump:





After letting the cupcakes cool, I got to work on the base layer of icing.


Step 1: Create your color palate.  I'm a big fan of vibrant colors, which this video showcases in a great way. I used white icing and split a bit among four bowls and kept and equal amount in reserve for some white background cupcakes too.  With food coloring, I added little by little until I got the right amount of each color.  The blue has a little bit of green in it in order to get more of a turquoise color. 


Step 2: Apply a base coat. As you can see in the above photos, the cupcakes came out rather peaked.  To remedy this for graphic designs, just apply the frosting more thickly to the edges than in the middle.  It won't be perfect, but it will help level out the tops.

Step 3: Create the silhouettes.  Early on, I decided that the best way to confront the challenge of making Beyonce cupcakes would be to work in silhouettes of the video, with the bright colors as background.

While I let the base coat of icing set, I worked on creating the silhouettes.  I took screenshots of the video from the particular shots I wanted to reproduce on the cupcakes.  You can do this on a Mac by hitting the 'command,' 'shift,' and '3' keys at the same time.  On a PC, hit the 'Print Screen' key at the top right area of your keyboard.

Step 4: Trace. With tracing paper, and a warning from my IT guy husband not to press too hard, I placed the paper on my computer screen and traced the images with pencil.

Step 5: Cut out the silhouettes.  


Step 6: With a toothpick, outline the images onto the cupcakes. 

Step 7: Re-trace the toothpick outline with chocolate frosting, then fill.

I didn't end up using all the images I targeted for this project.  One of the silhouettes I was most excited about didn't turn out all that well, because the detail that made it pop in the video, did not translate to frosting.

Step 8: Give to friends & family.  Enjoy!

I was pretty pleased with how these came out and while it's somewhat abstract, my friend totally got the concept and was psyched.




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