Topping Yo’ Cupcakes with Chrysanthemums!

A few weeks ago, my Crossfit buddy pinned up a pin on Pinterest detailing how to decorate your cupcakes to look like chrysanthemums. The steps looked easy enough, so I decided to try it at home:

photo by kimothy from kimothyjoyeats

Looks good, right?

The steps are pretty simple:

1. Start with some mini marshmallows, some bottles of different colored decorative sugars, and a Ziploc sandwich bag with a seal. You don’t necessarily have to use Ziploc — I used some weird ones from Ikea that have a yellow retro pattern — just as long as the bag has a seal.
2. Pour some sugar in the Ziploc bag. You can even go crazy and mix up different colors — I mixed up red, pink, and blue, hoping to get some sort of purple effect.
3. With a pair of kitchen scissors, cut the mini marshmallows diagonally and place in the bag with some decorative sugars. Give the bag a good shake — the sugar should only stick to the cut part.
4. Use your frosting to attach the marshmallows onto the cupcake in a chrysanthemum flower pattern. I recommend using a vanilla buttercream frosting, but you can also use cream cheese frosting like I did. The best way to do this is to frost the entire cupcake top, and then arrange the marshmallows by pressing them into the frosting immediately after before it crusts:
   photo by kimothy from kimothyjoyeats

And voila! There you have it. Chrysanthemum cupcakes, easy as pie. You can make a huge variety of flowers — feel free to play around with different colors and patterns and see what looks best!

For instance, here is one with multi-colored sugar:

Or here is another one by my friend Kimothy. She decided to leave some of the marshmallows unsugared, resulting in a white petaled chrysanthemum:

Very cool! This is a neat, effortless recipe that I’ll definitely try again in the future.