Maple Glaze

Maple Glazed Cupcakes with Colored Sugar Flowers

Today was my son’s fourth birthday. I ended up making cupcakes TWICE in one day. It must have been some kind of personal record for me–I made and decorated 4 dozen cupcakes. The first two dozen were for a family party we had for him. The party was just our family and another family–seven people all together, but sometimes people want two so I made a double recipe of vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting and blue flowers (below.) My son opted out of the cupcakes, which was a first for him. Recently, I have been experimenting with agave cupcake recipes, some of which didn’t turn out very well. He seems to have lost his taste for cupcakes after my many experiments. For these cupcakes I used straight up sugar, because he seems to be okay with sugar now :):):) and it was his birthday–but he passed on the cupcakes anyway.

For the second batch of cupcakes (for his class of 20 to share in school), I decided to make a maple glaze with a frosted line flower dipped in colored sugar. To make the flower, I thickened the glaze with more powdered sugar to pipe on a flower design and dip into blue colored sugar. Finally, I piped a dot of pink frosting and dipped it in pink sugar. I have used this design on cookies too. They look best when they are half pink flowers with blue dots and half blue flowers with pink dots, but I didn’t want everyone fighting over them so I went with all blue flowers with pink dots. Here is the maple glaze recipe…

Maple Glaze Frosting

1 cup confectioners sugar
1/2 tsp maple syrup
4-5 tsp water

Mix on high speed in mixer until smooth. Spread with a bent spatula or knife on cupcakes or cookies in think layer.

These are the first set of cupcakes…