Dr Pepper Cupcakes

A friend of a friend recently finished dental school, she became Dr. Pepper. For her 30th birthday, her friends threw a Dr Pepper themed party. I was given creative liberty to make any type of cupcake that fit with the theme.

I found these adorable cupcake toppers at heyyoyo.etsy.com along with some maroon polka-dotted cupcake liners and knew I had a start. I talked to the seller about just selling me the Dr Pepper picks instead of an assortment, which she agreed to.

For the remainder of the cupcakes I had planned to do 1/3 "30" and 1/3 the Dr Pepper logo. After I had purchased the picks I found out they didn't want to play up the 30 part because the girl was self conscious about turning 30. I ended up having an uneven number of each style of cupcakes, but it worked out in the end.

For the toppers I found an old-school Dr Pepper logo online, copied it to a Word document, adjusted the size and then created a page full of the logo. I printed out my page, covered it with parchment paper, then proceeded to pipe the white part of the logos with royal icing. I used a damp paint brush to help even things up and smooth out lines. I let those dry overnight. Then my plan was to flood each logo with maroon royal icing. When I did the first one, I lost the definition in my white.

Instead I created maroon ovals and then carefully placed the white lettering on top. The effect was really neat. The only problem is that as the maroon dried, the color started to seep through the white. I'm not sure how to prevent that problem. Once everything was dry, it became a crunchy edible cupcake topper. If you try this, you will want to make extras of everything, because it is likely you will have some breakage.

Unlike my fondant toppers, the royal icing did not melt when it came in contact with the buttercream icing on the cupcakes. I think I will use royal icing as the base for my toppers from now on.

At the last minute I decided to do the Happy Birthday Kristy toppers, even though they dried 4-5 hours before I moved them, it wasn't quite enough and the Birthday topper cracked. This method definitely requires planning ahead.

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I learned that some recipes of royal icing contain lemon juice and some don't. The lemon juice prevents the royal icing from drying as hard so it is nice to use on cookies, people won't break their teeth. The recipe I used was 1/3 c. meringue powder, 1/4 c. water, and 1 lb. powdered sugar. This dried fairly hard.