These pretty pastel Easter Cupcakes are easy to make, easy to serve, topped with delicious homemade buttercream frosting, and wow are they delicious!

Closeup of four Easter Cupcakes sitting on a white surface next to an easter egg, a pink towel and a pan of vanilla cupcakes.

Oh my goodness, we just love the way these Easter Cupcakes turned out. They are just so darn pretty. We just knew that they would look so pretty on our Mother’s Day brunch table. The best part is they could be for Easter, a baby shower, or even a Doc McStuffin’s party. Whatever you decide to do with them, they will be a big hit.

Ingredients You Will Need

All the ingredients you will need to make Easter Cupcakes including cupcakes, purple, pink and white frosting, food coloring and cupcake liners.

How to Make the Easter Cupcakes

Overhead shot of 12 vanilla cupcakes sitting on a white surface in front of a cupcake tin and a white and black table linen.

Step 1: Make a batch of cupcakes.  You can use a cake box mix, we have all the instructions you’ll need to make them taste just like homemade right here. Or you can make them from scratch with our yummy Homemade Vanilla Cupcakes recipe.  We used vanilla cupcakes but Chocolate Cupcakes would taste great too.

How to Make the Frosting

Glass mixing bowl filled with buttercream frosting sitting next to a decorating bag filled with frosting and two sticks of butter.

Step 2: The key to these delicious cupcakes is our Best Buttercream Frosting recipe.   It is light and creamy and buttery and super delicious! You will find the recipe and directions here.  One batch of frosting will be enough to frost 12 cupcakes.  If you used a boxed cake mix, you should have about 18 cupcakes and will need to double the frosting recipe.  Once you have the frosting made, split it into thirds.  Because the three layers of the frosting swirl are not all the same size we portioned our single batch of frosting as follows:

Purple:  1 cup
Pink: 3/4 cups
White: 1/2 cup

How to Color the Frosting

Collage image showing the food coloring formulas for tinting buttercream frosting Purple, Pink and White.

Now it is time to tint the frosting. We like the Wilton Color Right Food Coloring.  It is concentrated and you can get a bright color without having to use too much food coloring.  Here are the formulas we used for our Easter themed pastel Purple and Pink frosting colors:

Purple: 4 drops of Pink food coloring and 1 drop of Blue food coloring.
Pink: 2 drops of Pink food coloring.
White: No food coloring.

Putting it All Together

Closeup of a vanilla cupcake in a pink cupcake liner sitting next to frosting decorating bags and a pan full of vanilla cupcakes.

Step 4: Load the three colors of frosting into separate decorating bags with a Wilton 1M Open Star Decorating Tip and gather up your cupcakes!

Collage image showing how to make the butter cream frosting swirl for the Easter Cupcakes using purple, pink and white frosting.

Step 5:  For each cupcake, you will make three swirls of the frosting.  Purple on the bottom, then pink, and finally white.
Step 6:  With the decorating bag and the 1M tip, make one and a half circles of purple frosting around the edge of the cupcake.
Step 7:  Next apply another 1 1/2 circles of pink frosting but this circle should be a little smaller than the purple frosting layer as shown in the picture above.
Step 8: Finally, with the white frosting, add a third circle but this time finishing with an upward flourish so that the swirl ends in a peak at the top.

You can watch a video of how to make a frosting swirl like this in our How to Frost Cupcakes post.

Expert Tips and FAQs

How far ahead of a party can you make these cupcakes?

Ideally, you should make the cupcakes the day before the party. You can store them in the refrigerator but remember to take them out a couple of hours before you are going to serve them because a cold cupcake is not a good cupcake. If you are short on time, you could make the cupcakes further ahead and freeze them until the day before the party and then defrost them and frost them the day before the party.

Do the cupcakes have to be refrigerated?

No. They will be fine left out at room temperature. Day one and two, they will taste great. On day three, the frosting will start to be hard on the outside and the cupcakes will start to get a little bit stale but they will still taste fine. After day four … the cupcakes will be stale. You can get another day or two out of them by storing them in the refrigerator.

Close up of an Easter Cupcake sitting on a white table in front of more cupcakes, a cupcake tin and a pink table linen.

Other Easter Desserts You Will Love

Did you Make This Recipe? Leave a review below, then snap a picture and tag @twosisterscrafting on Instagram so we can see it!

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Easter Cupcakes

Yield 16-18 Cupcakes
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 18 minutes
Additional Time 20 minutes
Total Time 48 minutes

These pretty pastel Easter Cupcakes are easy to make, easy to serve, topped with delicious homemade buttercream frosting, and wow are they delicious!

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Make a batch of vanilla cupcakes cupcakes.
  2. Make a batch of our Best Buttercream Frosting recipe.
  3. Split the batch of frosting into thirds. The first third we left white and we tinted the other two purple and pink.
  4. Using a Wilton 1M Open Star frosting tip, make one and a half circles of purple frosting around the edge of the cupcake.
  5. Next, use the Wilton 1M frosting tip with the pink frosting. Apply one and a half more circles of frosting but these should be a little smaller than the purple frosting layer.
  6. Finally, add a final two circles of white frosting, this time swirling the top up into a peak.

Notes

Frosting Portions
Purple:  1 cup
Pink: 3/4 cups
White: 1/2 cup

Frosting Colors
Purple: 4 drops of Pink food coloring and 1 drop of blue food coloring.
Pink: 2 drops of Pink food coloring.
White: No food coloring.

Did you Make this Recipe? Leave a review below, then snap a picture and tag @twosisterscrafting on Instagram so we can see it!