How To Make Hydrangea Cupcakes

I made a batch of my favorite chocolate cupcakes and delicious vanilla cream cheese frosting. Then I colored half of the frosting blue, and half purple (mixing a few shades of blues and purples to get a good color match to the real hydrangeas). When making the frosting, use very little cream (less than 1 tablespoon), because the coloring will add some liquid, and you need the frosting to be pretty stiff to hold a nice shape.

If you’d like to match other hydrangeas, you could certainly use other color options, like light blue and medium blue, or two shades of pink. But I do think that frosting these with two colors (instead of just one) really added to the effect. I filled my piping bag with the two colors of frosting, side by side. Once your bag is filled (1/2 to 2/3 full), you may want to just squeeze some frosting into a bowl, until you see both colors coming out.

Then, using a Wilton 2D tip (a large closed star tip), I piped large, loose star shapes around the edge of the cupcake, and then filled in the center. If the frosting starts getting too soft (no longer holds a nice shape), then put the whole bag of frosting in the fridge for 15-20 minutes to let the frosting to firm up a bit.