Elizabeth Miller ’23, Staff Writer
This Thursday, October 13th, IU’s Dance Company is having a bake sale (cash only) to raise money for the club and their future events, such as recitals. I’m the secretary of the Dance Company, and I decided to bake some cupcakes for the event! I’m not a great baker, but my sister is, so I enlisted her help with this task.
I picked up some chocolate cake mix and strawberry frosting from the store, and I found some cute cups for my cupcakes and some decorative toothpicks that have dancers on them.
My sister taught me to crack eggs in a measuring cup first just in case a shell bit falls in because it is easier to fish shells out of the eggs instead of the whole batter. She also helped me monitor the cupcakes while they were baking until a toothpick would come out clean (I finally learned what that meant!).
When it came to decorating, she taught me that if you put tub frosting in a mixer, it will double in size! She recommends putting in a little food coloring to preserve the color because the frosting lightens up when it is whipped. We picked out a Wilton star piping tip, and got to decorating.
The last part to finishing the cupcakes was wrapping them individually for the sale. Since the picks made the cupcakes extra tall, they couldn’t fit into regular cupcake containers. I resorted to cutting clear cellophane into large squares and tying them up like a gift basket with pink gift twine. This took a long time. While doing all this I also documented the process for Immaculata’s TikTok account. Expect to see the video up on the page Wednesday or Thursday!
At the last minute, I decided to also make some chocolate dipped oreos for the bake sale as well. I melted some white candy melts in the microwave and used some red food coloring to turn the chocolate pink. I found some cute pink and gold sprinkles to decorate them with too. I got out a baking sheet and a silicone mat and started dipping. I used a fork for easy handling and dipped the oreos about a half to two thirds of the way down. I cleaned up the excess drips with a spoon and lined the oreos up neatly on the sheet. After every few dips, I sprinkled the sprinkles over the still melted chocolate so they would stick better. Once the pan was filled, I popped it into the freezer so they would set faster. I had to work fairly quickly because the chocolate hardened rather fast. Once they were all set, I bagged them up in sets of threes. The bags have gold polka dots on them, and I used matching gold twist ties to secure them.
In the end, baking took a lot longer than I thought it would. Wrapping the cupcakes was probably the hardest part in my opinion since the toothpicks made the cupcakes too tall to put in easy individual containers.
