Rock Star and Zebra Striped Cupcakes

So in my post HERE about my 5-year old's Rock Star Party, I mentioned that I had made some "rock star/tie dye/zebra" cupcakes. To go with the theme, they were pink, black and white zebra stripe (kind of) but didn't quite turn out as well as I had hoped. Granted, they still tasted great, but didn't have quite the stripe effect I had wanted - clearly I am an amateur. But... I'll give you my tutorial anyway in case you want to give it a go.

Zebra-stiped and tie-dye cupcakes

I was originally inspired by THIS post where she made a fabulous striped cake that I thought would be perfect for the Rock Star party. But since I always make cupcakes for my girls' parties, I thought I'd try a twist on it.

The first thing I did was mix up a batch of boxed yellow cake mix. Then I split it into 3 bowls and colored 2 of them accordingly with my Wilton gel food coloring to make black and pink batter.

Colored cake batter using Wilton gels

Next I transferred the batter into squirt bottles.

Squirt bottles gave me more control over the batter

Then I squeezed a little bit of each color into the center of each cupcake liner giving it a bit of time to spread out before I squeezed in the next color.

Let's get started squeezing...

Then I continued...

Keep going...

And continued...

Looking good....

And continued...

Not bad...

Until I had run out of batter and had only barely half-filled my cupcake liners. What the heck??!! Thankfully I had another box of batter so I repeated my mixing/coloring/filling and squeezing process, but by that point I was pretty annoyed and tired and admit that I kind of rushed through the process for the second half. *sigh*  But I finished them all anyway and they looked like this before I popped them into the oven...

Ready to go the oven

When they came out of the oven they looked pretty cool from the top!

Neat-o Stripes!

And even looked cool on the side where you could see the stripes through the wrapper.

You can even see the stripes through the wrapper

But when I cut one open, it didn't have nearly the striped effect I was going for.

Not as many stripes as I wanted :(

You can see where I obviously got lazy and started rushing just to get them done. *sigh* Pretty neat still, but not perfection. And, yes I am a perfectionist, so I was kind of bummed that I put all that effort into it and it didn't look perfect. But I sucked it up and reminded myself that none of the kids (or the parents, for that matter) would know what they were supposed to look like, so it didn't matter that they wern't perfect.

Since I did like the way the tops looked, I left half of them unfrosted. The other half I frosted with white icing and topped them with a zebra sugar-sheet circle.

Zebra-striped sugar sheets added some rock-n-roll fun!

I found the sugar sheets at Michaels (used a 40% off coupon, of course!) and cut them into circles with a cookie cutter from my stash.

Sugar sheets found at Michaels

Cut them into circles the same size as the cupcakes

Overall, everyone thought they looked cool so I decided not to beat myself up too much for the "failure" of my cake stripes. I added some cupcake toppers to the plain cupcakes to really "rock them out!". (using a images from the file I won from Bird's Party)

Rockin' Cupcake Toppers

Rock n Roll Cupcakes

Rock Star Party Cupcakes

As I said, I'm just an amateur (still, not bad for a CPA, huh?) so I guess I won't complain or criticize myself too much! Whatcha think?


Linking up to these parties - be sure to check them out!
The Frugal Girls
Truly Lovely
Keeping it Simple
Under the Table and Dreaming
C.R.A.F.T.
House of Hepworths
Eat at Home Cooks