On a whim, I decided to make something for our St. Patrick’s Day dinner and these amazing cupcakes were on my mind. A friend of mine posted a blog post about them recently and I thought they would be perfect to make.

I originally wanted to just make them as easy as I could with a store bought cake mix and frosting, but I decided to do them all from scratch instead. The last time I made cupcakes from scratch were for Jadon’s birthday party and that was a nightmare. I never thought I’d be so keen to do it again, but that was awhile ago and I wasn’t making nearly as many this time around.

All you need to do is start off with a white cake batter. I googled a recipe online and found this one to try out. It calls for 7 ingredients, all of which I already had at home. After you prepare your batter, split it up into equal parts for however many food coloring dyes you have. Use your dye in each of the parts and then layer them in the cupcake liner. You’ll want to do it color by color. Bake the cupcakes as directed in the recipe and they’ll come out looking a bit tie dyed on top, but the insides will be a beautiful rainbow.

Food coloring was the only thing we didn’t already have so Andrew was sent to the store to get some. The regular pack as well as the individual green pack were sold out (I attribute that to all of the green colored food going around) so Andrew ended up with the neon pack. Surprisingly, the neon pack turns out some pretty neon colors. We were skeptical that they’d be that bright.

For the frosting, I again googled for a butter cream frosting recipe and decided to try out this one. It definitely called for an excessive amount of confectioner’s sugar, but it also turned out to be really tasty. Super easy to make, this recipe also churned out a massive amount of frosting that I ended up having to dump the rest of. Next time around, I’m going to try to half the recipe instead. You’ll want to set aside some frosting for the white rainbow clouds. I used about 1/3 of this batch and put it into a 10 oz. featherweight piping bag. Then dye the rest of the frosting. We used the recipe on the back of our food dye box for “stormy blue.” I halfed it though since I had no idea how much frosting there was and it turned out to be a very pretty sky blue.

Once the cupcakes are all cooled, frost them with the blue frosting and add some sprinkles. Pipe a couple of white clouds for the rainbows and add a strip of rainbow candy ribbon on top. We used some of the sour Extreme candies we already had on hand.

They were a big hit at dinner and it was fun making them. They weren’t as complicated as I thought they’d be. Even if you just used store bought cake mix and frosting, doing this wouldn’t have taken very many extra steps. Super easy and super cute. Just the way I like it!