With the threat of 60% chance of thunderstorms looming over a beach day with friends, Gabby and I decided to bring the beach to the kitchen with these adorable “Crab Cakes”! We had been eyeing these pretty cakes for a while, and today seemed like a great day to make them in order to start our summer off right.
The original recipe we found over at Clean and Scentsible.
For the cake we went with a Devil’s Food Cake box mix. Hannah and Gabby using a box mix?? Yep. A plain old box mix- with a few secrets swirled in. We found this recipe over at The Cake Blog and it is hands down the most delicious box mix cake you’ve ever tried. The secret? A box of chocolate pudding and a few more eggs. That’s it!
For the frosting we went with just a simple vanilla buttercream. We’ve been experimenting with a few different butter creams and to be honest, we kind of just pick the first result when we search “buttercream” on Pinterest. But this one by Taste of Lizzy T’s turned out pretty well and I think we will use it again in the future! Side note- I didn’t have any butter on hand, so we used margarine. The result? Really tasty, but a slight yellow tint to the frosting. Not a huge deal, but I will make sure to have butter at the ready next time!
Now for the fun stuff: Decorating!
After baking, cooling, and frosting the cupcakes, we were ready to create our crabs! Here’s what we used:
- For the body: Gummy Orange Slices – Walmart
- For the claws: Gummy Peach Rings – Walmart
- For the eyes: Gum Drops (We picked the orange ones out of the bag) -Walmart
- For the pupils of the eyes: Black icing gel – Harris Teeter
- For the sand: light brown sugar
*Note: We only used one bag of the orange slices, peach rings, and gum drops, which will get you about 12 crabs. If you want 24 crabs, make sure to buy two bags of each!
To assemble, we played around a bit and ended up using 1/3 of the peach ring for each “claw” and 1/2 of a gumdrop for each “eye”. The original blog found candy eyes, but we just used left over frosting for the whites of the eye and black icing gel for the pupils in order to save money.
We sprinkled some brown sugar over the frosting, added a crab, and voila! Our very own crab cakes!
These cupcakes were a hit with our friends, and will definitely go on our list of favorite cupcakes!
