Flag Cupcakes
Outdoor July 4th celebrations often call for festive foods that are easy to serve to a crowd. These delicious mini cupcakes fit the bill and look right at home on a dessert table alongside watermelon slices, strawberries, or a mixed berry salad.
The tender sour cream cupcakes can be made ahead and frozen—making prep the day of a breeze. They’re topped with our Swiss Meringue Buttercream, tinted with red and blue food coloring and piped in alternating stripes. A patriotic little bite to end the meal!
The cupcakes are a moist, flavorful sour cream yellow cake, made by the modified creaming method where the egg yolks are added to the creamed butter and the egg whites are beaten and folded in at the end.
Flag Cupcakes
| Yield: 26 mini cupcakes | # of Servings: 12 | Method: Modified Creaming | Difficulty: Moderate |
Ingredients:
Cupcakes:
1 ¾ cup (8 oz / 227 g) cake flour, sifted
1 ¾ tsp (.3 oz / 9 g) baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda
½ cup (4 oz / 113 g) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup less 2 tbl (6.2 oz / 175 g) sugar
2 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup sour cream
2 egg whites
1 pinch salt
2 tbl (.9 oz / 26 g) sugar
Topping:
1 recipe Swiss Meringue Buttercream
Blue food coloring, gel preferred, as needed
Red food coloring, gel preferred, as needed
Tools and equipment needed:
- 1 24-well mini muffin pan, or two 12-well mini muffin pans
- Mini muffin plan liners
- 1 (xx size) ice cream scoop
- 3 small plastic pastry bags
- 2 small basket weave pastry tips (Ateco #47 and #48) and three couplers
Pre-recipe preparations:
- Place liners in the muffin tins.
- Preheat oven to 400°F.
Directions:
Cupcakes:
- Thoroughly whisk together the dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl. Set aside.
- In countertop mixer with paddle, or handheld mixer, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
- Beat in egg yolks, one at a time. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, beat until smooth.
- Add the dry ingredients in three parts, alternately with the sour cream in two parts, beginning and ending with the dry. Use a plastic spatula to scrape up from the bottom to ensure a well-blended batter. The batter will be thick.
- In clean bowl, whip the egg whites with the salt until soft peaks. Slowly add the sugar and whip until just reaches firm meringue stage. Do not overwhip.
- Stir ¼ of the whites into the batter to lighten before folding in the remaining egg whites, just until blended.
- Scoop better to evenly fill the wells almost to the top.
- Bake just until each cupcake is just firm to the touch and a cake tester comes out with only a few moist crumbs, about 8 to 10 minutes.
- Remove pan from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes. Gently remove the cupcakes and place on a cooling rack.
- Bake remaining cupcake batter.
Finishing:
- Separate the buttercream into three bowls. Color one bowl red and one blue by adding a few drops of the food coloring into the bowl. Add additional drops as needed to achieve the desired shade of red and blue.
- Fit one pastry bag with the #48 basket weave tip and fill with red buttercream and do the same with another bag with white and the #47 tip. Pipe three red strips across the cupcake, leaving room in between. Pipe two white strips in between the red.
- Fit it the last pastry bag with a small star tip, fill with blue buttercream and pipe small star stars on the border of each cupcake.
- Store in the refrigerator, serve at room temperature on flat serving plate.
