my new cupcake pan

My mother gave me this awesome cupcake pan she found at a hobby store and I couldn't wait to try it out.   The pan makes cupcakes that are flower shaped.  (that's right the cake part looks like a flower.)  Just thinking about all the decorating possibilites makes my head spin, but since it's the 4th of July and the pan has five petals I thought they could double as star shaped so I decorated them accordingly.

To use you start by dropping your cupcake liner in and filling just the liner with batter.  Then bake in the oven at whatever temperature the recipe calls for; for 5 minutes.  Then take out the pan and spray the petal part of the pan with cooking spray and pour the batter on top of the petal part of the pan.  Then just bake for the remaining time that the recipe calls for.

When done baking move cupcakes to a wire rack.

As you can see the top part of the cupcake looks just like a flower (or a star in this case).  And they are not top heavy and set evenly on a plate.

After they cooled I had fun decorating the cupcakes with red, white and blue icing and sprinkles.  One way I came up with is to make what I thought looked like a firework on top of the cupcake.

I made circles with a gel decorating icing and then took a fork and draged it through the gel and white icing beneith.  (I thought this could also work if you were wanting a tie dyed look too.)

I'm sure I will be baking more and decorating them like flowers in the near future, but I wanted to share how great this pan worked and pass along this idea other ways to use it besides flowers.

This post was linked to Cupcake Tuesday.