- Cupcake Mix – I chose strawberry for it’s nice pink color.
- Frosting – The photo shows two kinds of frosting {because I was making up the plan as I went along}, but I actually only ended up using the pink canned Betty Crocker cake icing, which conveniently came with it’s own frosting tips (no need for a cake decorating bag).
- Cupcake Liners or Baking Cups – I wanted pink tutus, and was surprised that pink baking cups were hard to find the day I needed them. After trips to three stores, I purchased a combo pack of black and pink baking cups at Michaels.
- Gift Tags – I created the leotards from a package of cute pink gift tags. These were ideal because they were the weight of tag board and had a slick surface on the front that didn’t absorb the frosting – but any other heavy weight paper world work as well.
- Lollipop Sticks – You only need one lollipop stick for each cupcakes, but you’ll likely have to buy a larger package. Fortunately they are very inexpensive. I bought a bag of 50 at Michaels.
- Washi Tape – The washi tape will be on the back side of the cupcakes, so it doesn’t even have to match, but I chose a cute pink pattern from my collection.
- Flowers – The flowers are the optional item here, but I really do think that they made a cute addition! I bought this package of pink ombre paper flowers in the cake decorating section of Michaels.
- Toothpicks – You will need one toothpick per cupcake.
After cutting out all of the leotard shapes, I attached a lollipop stick to the back of each with a short piece of washi tape. I then used scissors to cut down the length of the lollipop sticks so that each only protruded about 1 inch below the bottom of the leotard.
To attach the tutus, turn each cupcake liner strip upside – by which I mean that the edge where you cut off the round bottom will be wrapped around the top of the cupcake. As you can see in the photo above, because the cupcakes are bigger at the top than at the bottom, one upside down cupcake liner won’t wrap all the way around, so you’ll need to overlap two ruffly cupcake liner strips to create the appearance of one complete tutu.
These were so fun to create, and were really super quick to put together! I was able to make a dozen ballerina cupcakes in just about an hour, including baking time.
If you have a little ballerina in your life, be sure to pin the image below so that you’ll be able to quickly pull up these simple instructions the next time a birthday rolls around. Or, why wait for a birthday? Any day is a good day for cupcakes in my opinion! 🙂