Frozen Ombre Swirl Cupcakes

posted by Nancy on April 28, 2021 // 1 Comment

Our gorgeous Frozen Ombre Swirl Cupcakes will be the hit of your Frozen Birthday Party and nobody will suspect how easy these delicious cupcakes are to make.

Closeup on five Frozen Ombre Swirl Cupcakes sitting on a white table surrounded by snowflake decorations, cupcakes and a blue table linen.

We had a lot of different desserts at our Frozen Birthday Party … Mini Cakes, Rice Krispie Treats, Pretzel Bites, Frosted Sugar Cookies, but no cupcakes! As we were making our Christmas Swirl Cupcakes, Laurie and I said, practically in unison “These cupcakes would look so beautiful in our Frozen Ombre colors.” We were not wrong. I think these Frozen Ombre Swirl Cupcakes are the most beautiful cupcakes that we have ever made. They would definitely be the star at any Disney Frozen Birthday Party! (And P.S. – they are really easy to make!)

Ingredients You Will Need

How to Make the Cupcakes

12 vanilla cupcakes sitting on a white surface in front of cupcake tins and a whisk.

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

Closeup on a glass bowl filled with buttercream frosting sitting next to a decorator bag filled with buttercream frosting.

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 four portions. Because the three layers of the frosting swirl are not all the same size we portioned our single batch of frosting as follows:

Dark Teal: 3/4 cup
Medium Teal: 3/4 cups
Light Teal: 1/2 cup
White: 1/2 cup

How to Color the Frosting

Collage image showing the food coloring formulas for making teal ombre buttercream frosting.

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 Frozen themed ombre frosting colors:

Dark Teal: 5 drops of Blue food coloring
Medium Teal: 2 drops of Blue food coloring
Light Teal: 1 drop of Blue food coloring
White: No food coloring

Putting it All Together

Closeup on a vanilla cupcake sitting in front of four decorator bags filled with frosting and a tin full of vanilla cupcakes.

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

Collage image showing the steps for creating the ombre swirl effect for the Frozen Birthday Party Cupcakes.

Step 5: For each cupcake, you will make four swirls of the frosting. The darkest color of teal on the bottom then medium teal, then light teal, and finally white. With the decorating bag and the 1M tip, make one and a half circles of dark teal frosting around the edge of the cupcake.
Step 6: Next apply another 1 1/2 circles of medium teal frosting but this circle should be a little smaller than the dark teal frosting layer as shown in the picture above.
Step 7: Repeat the process again, this time with the light teal frosting.
Step 8: Finally, with the white frosting, add a fourth 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.

Closeup of a Frozen Ombre Swirl Cupcake sitting on a white surface surrounded by snowflake decorations.

Other Frozen Party Desserts You Will Love

Frozen Ombre Rice Krispie Treats

Frozen Marble Sugar Cookies

Frozen Ombre Mini Cakes

Olaf’s Warm Hug Hot Vanilla Milk

Did you Make This Recipe? Leave a review below, then snap a picture and tag @twosisterscrafting on Instagram so we can see it!
And don’t forget to follow us on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram!