How to Stripe Your Icing

Ever wonder how bakeries get more than one color in their icing decorations? The trick is called "striping," and it's actually pretty easy to do. All you need are decorating bags, clean paintbrushes, icing, and gel icing colors.

These cupcakes were for a birthday party for two of my nephews. The theme of the party was Cars. I couldn't find any good Cars muffin cups or cupcake decorations, so I just used these generic car and truck muffin cups I found at JoAnn's and then striped the icing. The older boys said they looked cool. :)

How to Stripe Your Icing

What You'll Need:
1) decorating bag(s)
2) gel icing colors
3) icing
4) clean paintbrushes (ones that you've never actually used with paint!)

There are two ways you can do this. If you've got good quality gel icing colors, dip your paintbrush in the color you want to strip your icing. Run your paintbrush up the inside of your decorating bag. You can repeat this process on the opposite side of the bag with the same color or a different color. Then fill the bag with white icing. As you push the icing through the bag, the color you striped along the inside of the bag will transfer to your icing.

If you have the liquid kind of food coloring instead of gel colors, you can still create the same effect with a slightly different procedure. In small bowls, mix some icing with the color you want. Then use a small spatula or knife to spread some of the icing along the inside edge of the decorating bag. Repeat again on the opposite side. Fill the rest of the bag with white icing.

For the above cupcakes, I didn't have the right kind of gel icing color, so I used this last method with small amounts of blue and green icing.