The Simple, Sweet Life

Recipes for a sweet day!

Easter Chick Cupcakes

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These Easter cupcakes are so cute and easy to make!

Easter feels really early this year, and I feel like it’s kind of snuck up on me. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have noticed except that my Pinterest feed has become full of Easter stuff lately. One thing that caught my eye were these ADORABLE cookies from Diamonds for Dessert. So. Stinkin’. Cute. And, of course, my first thought was, “This needs to be a cupcake too!”

Easter Chick Cupcakes
Makes 12 cupcakes

For the raspberry lemonade cupcakes:
4 tbsp. (57 grams) butter, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 tbsp. lemon zest
1 tsp. raspberry extract
1/3 cup milk
1 cup all purpose flour

For the frosting:
1 cup granulated sugar
3 tbsp. water
2 egg whites
1 1/2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. lemon juice
Yellow gel food coloring

Additional things:
Royal icing
Food gel coloring in black and orange
Parchment paper
A large, round tip
Yellow sanding sugar (optional)

For this little project, you can really use any flavor of cupcake you want and you can flavor the frosting with whatever extract you’d like, but you’ll want to use the frosting recipe above because it’s very light and will hold its shape well. It’s also a meringue-like frosting (often called boiled icing or 7 minute icing) and will develop a skin on the outside the longer it’s exposed to air so it can’t be made in advance and the cupcakes really shouldn’t be frosted more than a day in advance. Since I detailed how to make these cupcakes and frosting in another post, I’ll simply refer you to that rather than going through all the same instructions again here. You can find my post for raspberry lemonade cupcakes here.

raspberry lemonade cupcakes

In addition to the cupcakes and frosting, you’re going to need some royal icing (you can also use dark chocolate and orange candy melts) eyes, beaks, and feet. You can find my recipe for royal icing here, and you can make these pieces as far in advance as you want, but they will need about 3-4 hours to dry before you can use them. For the feet and beaks, you’ll want a relatively stiff royal icing (piping consistency) and you’ll want to tint it orange. To make the beaks, pipe a small dot of icing onto your parchment paper (you can use a binder sleeve too) and continue giving the bag pressure as you pull it up and away. For the feet, you’re essentially going to make a “W,” starting at the toes and pulling the icing back towards the heel. For the eyes, use a 20-second icing tinted black. You can make the eyes as small or large as you want (I, personally, think the smaller eyes look a little better).

royal icing accents

Once you have your royal icing pieces, cupcakes, and frosting (tinted yellow), it’s time to assemble everything. With a large round tip, pipe an even layer of frosting around the top of the cupcake. It’s ok if the frosting pulls into a point when you pull the piping bag away from the cupcake. We’re just going to put a head there anyway. To make the head, pipe a dollop of frosting (slightly off-center) on top of your first layer of frosting. Using a clean pair of tweezers, add the feet, beak, and eyes.

Piping frosting

Second layer of frosting

Piping chick cupcakes

If you want to add some texture, you can use yellow sanding sugar.

With and without sanding sugar

Easter chick cupcakes

Spring chick cupcakes

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Comments

    • They were lots of fun! And after all the cakes I’ve been making, a very nice change of pace. 🙂

      Reply

    • Haha I actually hadn’t thought of it before you mentioned it, but I definitely see the resemblance now! 🙂

      Reply

    • Thank you so much! I’m glad you liked my little photo bomber. He’s kind of a character. 😉

      Reply

    • Thank you! I have to admit, we’ve finally gotten some sun here and raspberry lemonade just sounded so… spring-y! 🙂

      Reply

    • Thank you! 🙂 I found the bunting on Pinterest last year, and it was simply too cute not to make! If you’re interested, you can find that tutorial here.

      Reply

    • How exciting! I’ve always loved the idea of having chickens, but we unfortunately live in an apartment complex so it’s not really feasible. Can’t wait to see and her all about your adventures with chicken raising! 😀

      Reply

  27. The frosting ingredients here and those in the linked Raspberry Lemonade Cupcakes instructions are slightly different. Do you add the lemon juice at the same time you would add the Raspberry Lemonade Powder if you were using that for flavoring? …looking forward to making these!

    Reply

    • Exactly! 🙂 Just add the lemon juice (or any other flavoring you might want to use) at the same time as the raspberry lemonade powder in the other recipe.

      Reply

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