Graduation Cupcakes

It's finally summer! For the last few weeks, all my free time and my every thought has been devoted to the many practical finals and projects to finish up the semester. But now I get 3 whole months of sun and the beach (and no classes from 5 to 10pm after 8 hours of work!!!) until fall.

My roomate is even better off than me, as she just graduated from SDSU on Friday! Congrats Jenny!! Between her and my brother graduating elementary school in a few weeks, I have lots of graduation cupcakes on the agenda.

I have a super easy idea for graduation cupcakes that will be sure to impress. I saw some graduation cupcakes in the Hello Cupcake book using chocolate covered graham crackers and oreos and it gave me an idea for my own version of a graduation hat:



The bottom of the hat is an upside down Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, the square top is a Ghiradelli dark chocolate square. I attached the two with royal icing and used it to pipe a little tassle on the top. The cupcakes are white cake and white frosting (her favorite!)

Here are the chocolate hat toppers before I assembled them:



I did this the day before, so they would have plenty of time to dry and stick together (because I'm a clutz) You can easily do this the day of, just make sure you don't knock the top off.

To make the tassles: Pipe a circle in the center of the chocolate square and give that a few minutes to dry. Then pipe a line going from the center to one of the corners and use a toothpick to pull the royal icing out into smaller tassle strings. I tried to pipe the strings first and they all melded together into a blob.

SDSU's school colors are red and black, so for the frosting, I striped my pastry bag with these colors so it came out with the swirles throughout it. I will be posting a tutorial on this shortly.

Congrats again to all the Graduates out there!!