April Showers *Sprinkle Surprise* “Raining” Cupcakes

I know: it’s a mouthful.

Both the cupcake and the name. But so much fun!

I love the idea of food with hidden surprises inside, and with spring coming at us full force, I wanted to do something in that vein.

Thus was born the April Showers *Sprinkle Surprise* “Raining” Cupcakes!

April Showers for the fact that it’s now April and raining. A lot. The day we made the cupcakes, in fact, was hounded by heavy thunderstorms. Sprinkle Surprise because of the sprinkles hidden inside. And Raining because the cupcakes “rain” out sprinkles like raindrops when they’re opened or bit into.

Here are all the supplies I used. I did use blue sugar crystal sprinkles to top some of the cupcakes, which you can see in one of the photos, just not on all of them. In the end, I decided I preferred the way it looked without the sprinkles on top – when the icing looked like just a white fluffy cloud on top of the blue “sky” cupcakes.

The sprinkles we used to fill the cupcakes were the Wilton White Sugar Pearls. You could use just about any kind of sprinkle here, except maybe sugar crystals, but I liked how these represented raindrops so well. They’re one of the pricier sprinkles, too, but we didn’t use the whole container, so there’s still some left for future projects.

Oh, and to make life much easier, we used store bought cake mix and icing. I got the Blue Velvet cake mix because it’s in stock around here during springtime, but you could always add blue food coloring to any plain cake mix to achieve the same result.

The steps to create the hidden surprise of the raindrops/sprinkles inside the cupcakes is done after the cupcakes are baked.

Once the cupcakes are fully cooled, scoop out the center with a melon baller, but hang onto that little piece you remove.

Fill the hole in the center with your sprinkles. Be generous here. Add as many as will fit, because if you only put a few, then they won’t really “spill” out when you split open or bite into the cupcake.

Take that little piece of cake you’ve removed with the melon baller and pick off some of the fluffy interior of the cake from the flatter top portion of it, to make it more of a smooth and flat piece instead of a ball.

Then put that flat piece back on top of the hole that’s filled with sprinkles. And put aside (to discard or eat or whatever) those extra fluffy interior pieces that were removed to make room for the sprinkles.

It doesn’t have to fit perfectly – I didn’t exactly keep track of which piece went with which cupcake. Just put a little piece on top of the sprinkles just to hold them in a little better.

Then top the cupcakes with icing.

I put the icing into a bag with a large round icing tip to make this process quicker and easier. If you try to spread on the icing with a knife, things could get a little messy because the icing is what holds down the piece that you cut out, trimmed, and replaced on top of the sprinkles.

At this point we added the blue sugar sprinkles to the tops of about half of the cupcakes. Like I said, this part is up to you.