DIY Mini Wedding Cupcakes

This post has been in the works for a long time. Last October, my friend Veronica got married. Veronica’s sister Johanna made the cupcakes for her wedding. Mini cupcakes. +1,000 mini cupcakes. In 8 different flavors. Take a second to digest that information.

Johanna’s a civil engineer by trade, so clearly when she went to work on this process, there were spreadsheets and calculations that were done to make this happen. She took the time to write out some answers to exactly how she did it. It’s actually incredible. And not only were they beautiful in the end – they were also delicious!

How did you decide what flavors you were going to make?

I brainstormed a spreadsheet of cake flavors/icing flavors using a google doc. I invited each of them to rank the cupcakes on a scale of 0-10 with 10 being must have and 0 being absolutely not. We started out assuming regular size cupcakes. Based on the number of people, I decided that 4 flavors would give us about the target number of cupcakes. Dad suggested minicupcakes… that bought them 4 extra flavors (for a total of 8). After our 4th of July picnic, the family sat out on the deck to narrow down the final selections.

Final selections:

Pink champagne cake with Raspberry Champagne Buttercream
Café Latte Cake with Dark Chocolate Ganache
Kahlua Mudslide Cake with Bailey’s & Kahlua Swirl Buttercream
Lemon Cake with Swiss Meringue
Cosmopolitan Cake with Cosmopolitan Buttercream
Mint Chocolate Chip Cake with Crème de Menthe Buttercream
Mojito Cake with Lime, Mint, Rum Buttercream garnished with a candied key lime
Pumpkin Roll Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Do you have any tips for shopping in bulk for baking supplies?

Since I was “only” making 3 batches of each flavor, no single flavor was shopped for in bulk… although I did buy A LOT of butter! I considered hitting up the restaurant supply store but after assembling my shopping list (ingredient list with quantities) I ended up hitting up Walmart for most of my ingredients. (Their price on butter was better than the grocery store and they sell eggs in bulk.)

The cupcake wrappers were ordered from Wilton’s website. Their mini petal baking cupcakes come in a number of colors so we were able to get the same “pattern” in multiple colors although most of the cupcakes distinguished themselves without a wrapper color. I ordered almost twice as many as I needed since I couldn’t just run out to the store to buy more if I messed up a batch of cupcakes. (I did find some of the colors of these wrappers at AC Moore and Michaels… but neither store had enough wrappers or all of the colors.)

How much butter did you use total (roughly)?

It was A LOT… 30 lbs?

Tell me more about the cupcake stand.

I ordered the cupcake stand from Cupcake Tree. This was not the original plan…

The original thinking: I have a jigsaw, I can totally build a custom stand. The plan was to design a stand, draw plans in cad, print templates, determine how much hardboard would be needed, hit up Home Depot for materials, and get to work in the garage. Then I reconsidered the amount of time this would take and decided to look for another option. I found acrylic cupcake stands online that looked really cool, but the associated price tag for a decent size acrylic stand was NOT really cool. Then I found the cupcake tree website! I took votes for the shape. I wanted to get the square stand but the bride and groom wanted the round one… so we went with the round one.

The stand can be covered in paper or spray painted to protect it and add color. I decided that a spray painted stand would be easier to transport without damaging. The wedding colors were navy blue and sangria. I sprayed the stand with navy metallic spray paint (I picked the metallic because it had a slight glitter finish) and finished it with a clear high gloss enamel spray paint to give it a nice shine. The awesome side effect of the high gloss clear coat was that the reception hall staff were able to wipe the stand down with a wet rag before I packed it to take home at the end of the night… the cleanup was so easy! I hot glued a “sangria” colored ribbon around the edge of each of the circles and then hot glued a silver sparkle string on the ribbon to finish the edges. I ordered the end caps for the uprights of the stand and spray painted those to match the stand.

What I did not anticipate was the amount of spray paint I would need to get good coverage on the stand. I think I ended up making 4 trips to Home Depot by the end of the spray painting extravaganza.

To complete the display, we did a cupcake photo shoot with one of each flavor. We made a flavor guide with a description of the cake and icing next to each picture and framed it to stand next to the cupcake stand. We also printed/cut quarter sheets with the flavor guide so that guests could take one with them.

How did you manage to get it all done?

I have one kitchenaid pro bowl lift mixer, but I borrowed my mother’s kitchenaid pro bowl-lift mixer and my in-laws kitchenaid pro bowl-lift mixer so that I would always have a mixer available even while one mixers’ parts were being washed or whipping up a batch of icing.

I had help… I did not do this by myself. My aunt and one of the bridesmaids came down on Wednesday morning… and I ran them ragged! Aunt Pat made all of the wedding color chocolate script R’s for the flavors being garnished with a monogram. John printed pages of circles that represented the approximate diameter of the top of the cupcakes. To keep the R’s a consistent size that we knew would fit the cupcakes, AP used these templates under a piece of wax paper which was the release agent for the chocolate. Lauren did anything and everything that I thought of while we were working. She single handedly boxed most of the cupcakes after transferring them from pans to cooling racks. Everyone pitched in with dishes at some point in the process!

Schedule:

Tuesday – final check on recipe organization, kitchen cleaning, and grocery shopping. I had collected each of the recipes that I intended to use and wrote each cake recipe with its corresponding icing recipe and selected garnish in a notebook so that everything would be in one place. I also used this notebook to keep track of the quantities of each flavor of cupcake so that we could add an extra batch if a certain flavor came up short.
Wednesday – baking day. The goal was to have all of the cupcakes baked/cooled/boxed before going to bed… it was a late night! I don’t remember what time we finished, but it was definitely Thursday morning… maybe 3 am-ish?
Thursday – icing day… we boxed the cupcakes after they were baked and fully cooled. For icing day, we lined the kitchen island with one flavor at a time (the bases of the boxes sat inside the lids of other open boxes). I had two mixers going almost continuously during icing production. I used disposable icing bags so that we didn’t have to repeatedly wash icing bags (generally a painful process). The dual Kahlua/Bailey’s icing was the only one that used a reusable icing bag as I needed the strength of the reusable bag. Inside the reusable bag were two disposable bags… one with Kahlua icing and one with Bailey’s icing. The icings mixed into a swirl when squeezed through the tip but didn’t get all mashed together inside the bag. We motivated ourselves to finish by 6:30… our reward would be going to a favorite sushi restaurant for dinner. We succeeded in meeting our schedule and had a fabulous feast at Mino Sushi in Malvern!
Friday – transportation day… the cupcakes needed to be delivered with enough time for me to be ready for the rehearsal at 5pm. We delivered the cupcakes to the venue at 10:30 am.
Saturday – Wedding day

Why cupcake was your favorite and why?

My favorite was a toss-up between the Kahlua Mudslide cake with Bailey’s & Kahlua swirled Buttercream and the Mint chocolate chip cake with crème de menthe chocolate chip buttercream. Why?… hmmm, intriguing flavors, nice texture.

the cake topper

Where did you get the cake topper?

Wow Bobble. You pick a standard design (or opt to completely design your own… more expensive) and then you can customize the color of any of the features of the standard design. You send them face forward and face profile pictures of the person/people. They sculpt the faces and send you a proof picture. You can send back comments if there is something that you think should be changed about any aspect of the faces. They send you a final proof picture before they bake the bobbles. I selected a standard design that had the groom in a tux and the bride in a strapless lace-like dress. I customized the color of the tux… the standard color was black – I selected navy blue and I changed the flowers from red to pink and purple.

How do you transport 1056 mini cupcakes to a venue that is 2 hours away?

Mini Cupcake Cases. We used moving boxes and copy paper boxes to stack the containers several levels high and prevent them from sliding around in the car… not that there was much extra space in the car once we loaded the stand (disassembled), the cupcakes, and ourselves. We used AP’s Honda Element for the transport since it has a wide expanse of flat floor space and the back seats fold up to the sides of the car.

So that the cupcakes wouldn’t be mistaken for store-bought, I designed a sticker logo which we printed and placed on each plastic box.

All photographs were taken by Ryan Hulvat Studio in located in Bethlehem, PA.