A great way to add creativity and fun to your cupcakes is with edible decorations straight from the grocery store and tweaked to match your theme. We came up with this one – beer pints! – after being inspired by the champagne glass cupcakes in “Make It Easy, Cupcake!” by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. You’d be amazed at what you can create with a quick trip through the cookie or candy aisle for supplies.

NOTE: We kept things easy (and kid-friendly) by using boxed cake mixes and canned frosting for these sweeties. However, if you love to bake and really want to impress your guests, there are a variety of beer-infused and beer-inspired cupcake recipes online just waiting for you. Give them a go!

To experiment with different types of food for the beer pint decorations, we tried Hostess Twinkies, Hostess Ding Dongs, Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, and Daelman’s Stroopwaffels. Why those? Because they all are colors of typical beers – light gold to mahogany brown – and large enough to carve the shape of a standard pint glass.

All of the designs followed these steps (with an extra one for the Twinkies and Ding Dongs):

  1. Prepare your cupcakes by frosting the top generously. This will make a nice, sticky base for the decorations. We recommend alternating the color of the icing with the color of the decoration, i.e. light frosting with dark cookies or dark frosting with light cookies. This helps the decorations stand out more.
  2. Trim your cookies to the shape of a pint glass, which is a rectangle that is wider at the top and narrower at the bottom if the rectangle were standing on its short end. We recommend using a serrated knife and cut with a sawing motion. TIP: That extra step we mentioned for the Twinkies and Ding Dongs? Freeze them first. (This is another great tip from “Make It Easy, Cupcake!”.) This makes them solid enough to easily cut; otherwise they’ll smoosh and crumble at room temperature. It doesn’t affect the taste, promise!
  3. Place the trimmed cookies in the middle of each cupcake.
  4. Using white frosting (whipped looks best) draw a single line across the wider end of your cookie to be the foam on the beer pint.

You’re done! We included shots of our steps below to show you how each cookie turned into a beer pint. We’ll let you decide which one looks the most realistic.

Twinkies

Ding Dongs

Milanos

Stroopwaffels

For those of you that like advanced techniques, try cutting your cookies into a variety of shapes. After all, the standard pint glass, as seen below on the far left, is just one shape. How about some of these others?

Happy eventing!