Neon Fairy Buns

It was a good friend's birthday last week, and I had the pleasure of concocting her annual birthday dessert. I've done a variety of cakes in the past, but decided that I'd opt for the increasingly popular batch of cupcakes this year. Cupcakes are everywhere, nowadays! There are tons of bakeries popping up devoted solely to the petite, more whimsical, cousins of actual cakes. The great thing about the cupcake is that it feels immensely more justifiable to eat than a whole cake. "I'll just have one cupcake...or maybe two...." When there's an entire sheet of cake sitting in front of you, however, there's always the burden, that someone will eventually have to finish it.

All that being said, cupcakes are chic, modern, semi guilt-free, and capable of being colored a multitude of colors in a single batch, so of course they seemed like the perfect choice for my little baking endeavor. Another one of my good friends, who happens to be my P.I.C. when it comes to all things crafty, and helped me whip up this premier bundle of icing, had recently given me a copy of "The Gentle Art of Domesticity" by Jane Brocket. As my cohort so eloquently put it, the book "is like chicken soup for the crafter's soul." Inside one of the delightful chapters is a recipe for "fairy buns" (I love that euphemism for cupcakes!) and the icing that accompanies them. The icing is made with gel food coloring instead of liquid, and appears thick and shiny in all of the book's pictures. The second that I saw, the sparkling, bright colors, I knew that I had to find an excuse to try the gel-icing for myself. Here's my adaptation of the recipe:

(Ices ~24 Cupcakes)

2 cups powdered sugar

Water (varies)

Teaspoon of margarine

A couple teaspoons of vanilla (varies)

Gel food coloring (Can be found at Michael's or JoAnn Fabrics, if it's not at the grocery store)

Medium-sized bowl

Small bowls or glasses (to mix the different colors in)

Pour the sugar into a bowl. Add the tiniest amount of water. Too much water will NOT work, because the sugar shrinks as it gets wet. Continue to add small portions of water until sugar becomes a thick, gel-like consistency. Add the margarine. Add the vanilla one Tsp at a time. How much you add will depend on how much vanilla flavor you want your icing to have. Once you've achieved the optimal consistency and flavor of icing, you can begin to add the food coloring. We used the end of a toothpick to add the food coloring, and that seemed to work pretty well. You dip the end into the little pot of gel coloring, and then into your cup of icing. Swirl the toothpick to mix the icing color. If the hue that you're left with isn't "pow-wow bright" enough, simply repeat the process until you get a color that you're happy with.

Note: The icing starts off fairly runny, but sets and stiffens with time. If you wish to save time, you refrigerate the icing before attempting to spread it.

I chose some bright, punchy colors for my icing. I also decided to decorate each iced cupcake with a little Nike swoosh, as the birthday girl has an affinity for sports, and Nike, in particular. In fact, if you were to walk into the women's Nike display at your local Dick's Sporting Good's, you'd find an array of sports attire in the color of these cupcakes. I was lucky enough to find some matching wrappers at Meijer, so I composed a mix of monochromatic and contrasting fairy buns. Some of my particularly favorite combos were purple icing with a green wrapper, and pink icing with a blue wrapper. This icing is definitely the most fun icing I've ever made, so I'll definitely be using it again.