Vintage Circus theme smash cake and cupcakes

I was asked to make strawberry cup cakes that where strawberry on the bottom and white on the top with a vintage blue frosting. They also wanted a 4 inch smash cake for their daughter who was turning 1. I was instructed to have it the same blue as the frosting on the cup cakes and red vertical stripes with a red border on the top and bottom of the cake. To me it looked like a small drum!

Here is how I did it:

I used a strawberry box mix for the strawberry part of the cup cakes and THIS white cake recipe I found when surfing pinterest. I LOVE this white cake recipe. It is so delicious and I eat what too much of it LOL.

to get the cake mix in the cupcake wrappers without making a mess I put my batter into a zip lock bag. I then cup a tip of the bag off and piped the cake batter into the cup cake wrappers. This also allowed for get control over how much I put in the wrappers.

 

 

 I repeated this process with the white cake mix.

 This is what they looked like when they were done cooking. I was not expecting the strawberry to come through the white cake but it looks neet!

Here is a picture of the inside of the cupcake

I am not a fan of making cupcakes because I can never seem to get them the proper size. I either under fill them or over fill them :-/ But I think with a little more practice I will finally have it down. It took me 6 batches of cup cakes to get 36 perfect ones!! I of course was making cup cake deliveries to family and friends get rid of the rest! The cupcakes that are to the left in the picture are the ones I used for this order. The ones in the middle are my “back ups” in case I messed up on the first 36 and the ones to the right are the “muffin” top ones.

 

See the difference between a perfectly filled one and a over filled one that creates an over cooked muffin top.

 

This is the final result of the cupcakes

 

 

 

I forgot to take pictures of the cake process but I just used a 4” pan and made a 2 layer cake. It has butter cream frosting like the cup cakes. The side of the cake has blue fondant with red fondant stripes. I left the top with just butter cream so the birthday girl could play in it and get nice and messy!!