Cupcake Wars Birthday Party

My daughter loves the Food Network shows “Cupcake Wars” and “Cake Wars” and loves to bake so we decided to have a cupcake war of our own for her 9th birthday party. We invited tons of friends, divided the girls into two teams, put on our baking aprons, and had a blast baking and decorating cupcakes!

As the girls arrived, we put them on a team by having them grab an apron (bought from the dollar store) and an apron tag with a team name on it. The team names my daughter and I came up with were Cupcake Queens and Decorating Divas. As the girls arrived, I had them color their team poster. They wrote cute notes to the birthday girl and had fun drawing pictures and writing their names to show team spirit.

Before we started the competition, I quickly demonstrated how to hold the frosting bag and frost cupcakes using several different decorating tips. Then I had the girls work as a team and choose which 3 decorating tips they would like to use for their team.

Once that was decided, we set the timer for 60 minutes and the cupcake wars began. I had all the supplies out and ready for the girls to bake their cupcakes. Because I have a double oven, we were able to have each team use their own oven to bake 24 cupcakes.

They did amazingly well at mixing the batter and putting it in the cupcake liners. One team took a little longer to get their cupcakes in the oven, so to give them enough time to decorate the cupcakes (without having to melt their frosting on hot cake) we just tossed their baked cupcakes in the freezer to cool them down quickly.

While the cupcakes were baking the girls made chocolate melt shapes and fondant cut-outs for decorations on their cupcakes. The teams also worked on decorating their cupcake displays.

Each girl got to decorate 3 cupcakes with the 3 different tips. (Tip: to help prevent spillage from the top of the frosting bags, we put a small elastic hair band around the frosting bag at the top of the frosting.)

The girls did an amazing job at decorating their cupcakes and their displays. It was so fun to see their creativity.

Our judges were the birthday girl’s little sister and her little sister’s friend. They judged the cupcakes on taste and presentation using a point system. (Judging took place while the birthday girl opened her presents.)

The awesome thing was one team won best tasting and the other team won best presentation, but both teams got the exact amount of points and tied for the winner of “Cupcake Wars.”