Cupcake Cake-Gender Reveal

After taking some time off from baking cakes professionally, I recently jumped back in for a dear friend’s daughters gender reveal, in the form of a Giant Cupcake Cake.

In the past, I’ve tackled the Giant Cupcake Cake once for my daughter’s birthday while in college. With that design, I went with a pastel decorative theme married with a chocolate cake. Then, transported it two hours away to the University of Virginia for a special birthday celebration.

These giant cakes have a way of bringing smiles to everyone’s faces. There is something about a cupcake isn’t there? More so, something about a Giant Cupcake cake that brings them in abundance!!!

What You Will Need

• Large Cupcake Baking Pan
• 2 Boxed Cake Mixes, or a large homemade cake recipe, enough to make 2- 10″ layers or about 1 1/2 times your regular cake recipe
• Buttercream Frosting
• Wilton tip 1M
• Edible Decorating Pearls

Hardware-The Pan

The traditional pan used here is the Wilton Giant Cupcake Pan. It’s a perfect two in one pan for both the top and bottom of the cupcake.

You can purchase them in craft stores or online. Also, they have the rubber silicone mold versions available that give you the freedom to bake the top and bottom separately.

How To Make the Giant Cupcake Cake

There are various ways in which to bake this guy. Couple things to consider:

• The top and bottom will bake differently due to the depth of each pan and cake (bottom is much deeper and require longer baking time)
• Since the pan is dark, will need to bake at a lower temperature (325 degrees)

Cupcake Cake

You can use just about any type of cake recipe for this Giant Cupcake Cake. Typically, the dense type cakes like a pound cake hold the stability of this cake. However, any cake will do, even a box cake mix will work here.

For this gender reveal cake, I used a strawberry cake and colored the batter purple. You might be thinking why purple? Well, my friend who is the grandmother-to-be, was not privy to the gender until the day of the party. Hence, we went with purple. The best of blue and pink!

How Much Batter

For both cakes, (top and bottom) use about 6-7 cups of batter.

Whether using your favorite homemade cake recipe or boxed version (need two boxes). Both work great.

If using homemade cake recipe, use a larger recipe that would make more than 2- 8″ cake layers.

Baking

First, I like to bake the bottom and top layers in two separate bakes. This allows each to bake at different baking times and not to overbake the top section when baked together with the bottom.

Baking Cupcake: Bottom Section

• Preheat oven to 325, line bottom of the “bottom” pan with parchment paper circle
• Spray the bottom section generously with cooking spray
• Prepare cake batter, fill bottom section about 3 1/2-4 cups batter (about 2/3 full)
• Bake approximately 40-50 minutes till done (oven varies)
• Cool on wire rack about 30 minutes
• Invert to remove, cool completely on wire rack

Baking Cupcake: Top Section

• Spray the top section with cooking spray generously
• Fill the pan with 21/2-3 cups batter (about 2/3 full)
• Bake 30-40 minutes till done
• Remove from oven and cool 20 minutes
• Invert and place on cooling rack

When both cakes are cooled, they are wrapped in saran wrap to chill in fridge. Then leveled with a serrated knife to flatten the bottom of the top section, and the top of the bottom section. That sounds kinda confusing, doesn’t it?

You want the bottom section to be leveled so the top section fits nice and flush. Same with the top section, leveling the bottom will allow it to sit flush on the bottom section.

Crafting the Giant Cupcake

Two colors for this cake for decorating

BEIGE AND WHITE

Bottom Section: Gets iced with beige buttercream and smoothed. Edible white pearls are used for decoration.

Top Section: Piped white rosettes around the base, followed by piping in rows till the top is reached. Rosette is then piped at the very top. Edible white pearls placed throughout the top to bring in the pattern from the bottom.

The cake was a hit and oh, by the way, she is having a boy!!!!!

Hope you will give this Giant Cupcake a try in your cake baking kitchen and I would LOVE to see your designs!!!

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