Birthday celebrations and two-tone icing tutorial

My little man Nathaniel was 5 yesterday!!
It seemed like he had a week long celebration with cupcakes at preschool Wednesday then cupcakes at Early Intervention Friday then more cake with the family yesterday....he loved it!

Here are the cupcakes we took to Early Intervention.

The group had really loved reading a fire engine book earlier in the week and always love the fireman puzzles so we went with fire engine cupcakes.


I wanted to make the icing look like fire so I used yellow and red two tone icing.  The fire engine was made from fondant and white chocolate

How I made the two tone icing:

1.  Mix up two (or more) different colours of icing (I just used a buttercream icing).

2.  I used a medium star nozzle with my piping bag (see pic below).

3.  I then spooned one colour down half of the piping bag and the other colour down the other half.  

I forgot to take a photo so I drew up this diagram of what it kinda looked like when I put the icing in the piping bag, although mine was nowhere near as neat as this...

NB.  I have seen some tutorials that put the different coloured icing into separate piping bags (that don't have nozzles) and then put those bags into another piping bag (with nozzle) and pipe that way which probable gives a more uniform finish but seems like too much cleaning up to me.

4.  Pipe out some icing (onto a plate or small bowl) until the desired two-tone effect comes through.

5. Starting from the outside of the cupcake, spiral around until you reached the centre. 

NB.  If it doesn't come out how you want, just scrape it off and try again.



Here are the cupcakes that Nanny made...

Nathaniel just LOVES Mario so Nanny (and Poppy) printed out some Mario images, laminated them and stuck them onto sticks to make Mario cupcake toppers (and because Nanny is so good she did 3 colours in her icing).  The best thing was they made 2 of each image so now he has a set of Mario cards that we can play snap or memory with....great idea Nanny and Poppy!!

The last cake was a dinosaur cake to have with the family after dinner...

The dinosaurs were shaped from fondant....and didn't last very long!

poor dinosaur!

Well we are definitely caked out for the time being!  luckily we have another couple of months before our next birthday celebrations. 

If the instructions aren't clear or if you have any questions, don't hesitate to leave a comment.

Happy creating!!