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This is a how to guide for making a two-tone swirled frosting using a piping bag and tip.
Recently, my church hosted a bake off, and of course, I had to enter. I knew I wanted to make chocolate cupcakes, but I needed to do a little something extra to make them stand out. After running through many options, I decided to do a peanut butter and chocolate swirled frosting, which turned out so good! I figured I could share how I did it here, along with the frosting recipes I used. I did my swirl with two different flavors, but this can also be done with different colors of the same flavor.
The Frosting Recipes
As previously stated, I made chocolate and peanut butter buttercream frostings and piped them on top of chocolate cupcakes (cupcake recipe here). They were honestly some of the best cupcakes I’ve ever had, and I promise I’m not exaggerating. These are the frosting recipes I used. These are both full recipes, so depending on how many cupcakes you are piping you may want to halve the recipes.
Chocolate Buttercream
- Using an electric hand or stand mixer, beat 1 stick of softened butter until smooth.
- Continue mixing and alternate adding powdered sugar, cocoa powder and milk until you have a total of 2⅔ cups of powdered sugar, ½ cup of cocoa powder, and ⅓ cup of milk.
- Then, add 1 tsp vanilla extract.
- If needed to get to a good piping consistency, add more milk 1 tbsp at a time until desired consistency is reached.
Peanut Butter Buttercream
- Using an electric hand or stand mixer beat 2 sticks of softened butter and 1 cup of peanut butter until smooth.
- Add in 1 tsp vanilla and ⅛ tsp of salt, and mix.
- Continue mixing and add 2½ cups powdered sugar a little at a time until well blended.
- If needed to get to good piping consistency, add some milk 1 tbsp at a time until desired consistency is reached.
For both of these recipes, you want the buttercream to be a piping consistency, which means it is firm enough to hold its shape, but soft enough to be squeezed out of the piping bag. It should hold stiff peaks when the beater is lifted from the mixing bowl, but still be soft like a creamy peanut butter.
Combining these recipes to swirl, I had enough frosting for the 29 cupcakes I made with enough left over to pipe at least another dozen. Different designs use different amounts of frosting, so you can adjust to however much you need.
How to Swirl Them
To swirl the frostings, you put them in the same piping bag. If you’ve ever put frosting in a piping bag, though, you know that just scooping each one into the bag will muddy them. To keep them side by side, we use plastic wrap.
- Lay out a sheet of plastic wrap on a clean surface. In the center of the plastic wrap, scoop your buttercream flavors or colors and place them side by side. If using two whole frosting recipes like the ones provided above, do two pieces of plastic wrap and only put half of each frosting on each piece.
2. Gently wrap the plastic around the frosting, bringing the two flavors or colors next to one another in a tube shape. Be careful not to squeeze them together and mix them. Do not close the ends.
3. Carefully place the frosting bundle into the piping bag. Then, gently squeeze from the top to push the frosting down into the tip of the piping bag. They should be side by side.
If you have made two frosting bundles, you should be able to easily remove the plastic wrap from the piping bag when the first runs out and replace it with the second.
4. Pipe whatever design you wish on your cupcakes, cookies, cake, etc.
Tip! – Pipe on a paper plate first and play around with how you hold the bag. The colors can come out side by side or one on top of the other, depending on how you hold it.
If you want to do the exact design I did, use a 1M piping tip. Holding the bag straight up, start in the middle of the cupcake and swirl out around that center point until the cupcake is covered. If you need piping tips, I got this set and they worked great!
This technique is a great way to combine flavors, add visual interest to your cupcakes, or both. You can also use the same technique to do more than two colors or flavors, but just be careful not to put too much icing in your roll. I recommend starting with just two so you can get the hang of it first. If you try it out, let me know how it went!
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