GOLD GILDED WATERCOLOR CUPCAKES

Celebrate someone you love with the prettiest cupcakes you ever did see! 

Bake your favorite cupcake recipe in white baking cups. Try to not to overfill your baking cups so you have a nice flat cupcake surface to work on. While your cupcakes are cooling roll out your fondant on a clean surface, ideally with a silicone rolling pin. We started with about a small apple sized hunk of fondant and that was enough for 12 cupcakes, plus a test piece to practice our watercolor on.

Select a circle cutter by first testing to make sure it's the right size for your cupcakes. Cut out your circles and place them gently on top of your cupcakes. We used an icing spatula to make picking up the fondant circles easier and to help retain their nice round shape.

Using a small paint brush, mix just a teenie tiny amount of food coloring into your vodka until you have all your desired colors. A paint palette or small dixie cups work great for this. We use vodka because it evaporates quickly and doesn't leave an extra flavor behind. Try out your colors on your test piece of fondant. If your colors are too light add a touch more food coloring. If they are too dark dump and start over.

Once you have your edible water colors just right, dab away on your fondant! We used 2-3 colors per cupcake and just had fun dabbing and swirling until we liked how they looked.

To add a little glam use 2 dry paint brushes to gently tear small pieces of edible gold leaf and apply them to your still wet painted cupcakes. Edible gold leaf is very "flyaway" and finicky to work with. That's kind of the fun of working with it though, you never know exactly what you'll get.  Just go with it. It's gold, it will be gorgeous!

• Your favorite cupcake recipe
• White baking cups
• White fondant
• Circle cutter set
• Soft pink gel paste food coloring
• Orange gel paste food coloring
• Lemon yellow gel paste food coloring
• Mint green gel paste food coloring
• Electric blue gel paste food coloring
• Electric purple gel paste food coloring
• Vodka or lemon juice
• Edible gold leaf
• 3 small paint brushes

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