It’s the most wonderful week of the year! I’m obsessed with Shark Week, and not just because it came to life the same year I did back in 1987 (please don’t do the math). I can empathize with sharks because I, too, suffer from resting bitch face and feel the need to eat my body weight in meat at every meal. I had such a blast making my Shark Week cake last year, I knew I wanted to take a bite out of another challenge and make some red velvet Shark Week cupcakes.
While I love how these turned out visually, the fishue here ended up being a gluten free red velvet recipe that turned out to be a flavorless disaster. Needless to say, I am still on the hunt for a red velvet recipe that is gluten free and tastes like actual cake. The recipe I tried ended up very tough, dry, and tasted only like a whisper of cake…I probably just perfected a new La Croix flavor. I’m not even sure I’d feed these to a bull shark, and they will literally eat anything. So no recipe in this blog, just a tutorial on how to make your own shark and shark fin cupcakes. Use whatever flavor or cake recipe you’d like! Hopefully yours will be edible and not just a really delightful reminder of your failure every time you open your fridge. I can’t bring myself to throw these away because they’re so cute. Yes, sharks can be cute. Have you seen an angel shark? ADORABLE.
So these cupcakes use the flip/smush/freeze technique I did with my bee cupcakes. I used a stiff cream cheese frosting for those, but I wanted to try using light butter this time to see if it was thick enough to work with this method. Happy to report, yes, you can cut the calories in half and still smush cupcakes to your heart’s content. For the lightened up cream cheese frosting, you need:
- 112 grams (1/2 cup) light butter, cold
- 224 grams (8 ounces) 1/3 the fat cream cheese at room temp
- 4 cups Lakanto powdered monkfruit (regular powdered sugar also works)
- 1 TBS vanilla extract
- 1-2 TBS milk if needed to thin frosting out a bit
- Grey, red, black, blue, and sky blue gel dyes
- Round tips (I used numbers 2 and 12)
Start by whipping the cream cheese and butter in a stand mixer for 2 minutes. Then add in the vanilla extract, half the powdered monkfruit, and mix well. Scrape the bowl and add in remaining monkfruit. If your frosting is too stiff, add in a tablespoon of milk at a time, until you get a smoother consistency. I did not need any milk since the light butter is more liquid-y than full fat butter.
Divide your frosting:
- Put a small amount of plain white in a piping bag with a #2 tip to make the teeth and waves
- Mix a small amount of frosting with black dye and put in a piping bag with a #2 tip for the eyes
- Mix a small amount of frosting with red dye and load into a bag with a #12 tip for the shark mouth
- Mix a medium amount of frosting with gray dye and load into a bag with a #12 tip for the shark fin and body (I dyed two different shades of gray frosting, but only ended up using one for both cupcakes)
- Split the remaining frosting in half, dying one half blue and the other half sky blue. Load each into bags with a #12 tip or snip a larger opening. This will be water and sky.
Put the cupcakes all face-down on a large cookie sheet. Then transfer this to your freezer to set for 30 minutes. Now, save the rest of this dark blue frosting to use for ocean water with the shark fin cupcakes. You can repeat this background-making process using the lighter blue for the remaining cupcakes to make the sky while your dark blue cupcakes freeze.
What? Too gross? OK, peeling the Parchment paper away from the frozen cupcake is more satisfying than peeling the protective film off of a new electronic. There, I’ve classed things up a bit for you. Once you’ve let those cupcakes freeze for a half an hour, the Parchment peels off easily to reveal a jawsdropping flat, smooth cupcake background.
With your dark blue background cupcakes, pipe an oblong/oval shape with a flat bottom and pointy top for the nose. Fill in with more frosting, use an angled spatula to smooth a bit, then take your old Parchment paper, flipped over to the clean side, and smush your cupcake back down gently. Repeat with however many shark face (oh ha ha!) cupcakes you want to make. Freeze these again another 30 minutes. I know, a lot of down time here–but think of it this way: pipe a bit, watch half a Shark Week episode, pipe a bit more, finish the episode, and voila! Back-to-back-to-back shark-related activities like the Discovery Channel (probably) intended.
What? Too gross again? A shark’s gotta eat! OK, I promise this is the last flip and freeze for the shark face cupcakes. Peel off the Parchment paper, grab your red frosting, and pipe a big ol’ shark mouth on top of the grey body. The ratio of head-to-mouth can be pretty close to 60-40 here. I’m fairly certain some sharks are 90% mouth (looking at you, basking shark), so bigger is better. Now, cut some clean sheets of Parchment to flip and freeze these on for another 30 minutes.
Needless to say, my shark here is less than great when it comes to the number of teeth he has, but he’s more than great when it comes to how charming he is. I feel like he’s popping up out of the water to tell me an terrible joke, and I’m here for it.
To pipe the teeth, I took my white frosting and drew little triangles all over his mouth. Then I took my black frosting and made two little dots for eyes. If they look like black, tiny, soulless little eyes staring off into the abyss…they’re perfect.
Repeat the teeth and eyes on your remaining shark face cupcakes and revel in your work…it’s kind of a big gill.
Once you’ve done the flip and freeze for your sky background on your shark fin cupcakes, rejoice, the flipping and freezing has come to an end. Take your gray frosting and draw a little triangle in the middle of each of these cupcakes. Smooth slightly with an angled spatula, but keeping some texture here really does look cool. I tried to flip and freeze one or two, but it turned the fin into a pyramid, and to my knowledge, there are not any shark-headed Egyptian gods, so this was not the vibe I was going for.
Now, take your dark blue and pipe on the bottom half of your cupcake, below your shark fin. Again, use an angled spatula to create texture for the waves. Take your white frosting and make wave caps at the top of the dark blue. I flipped my cupcakes on the side so I could pipe on the front and on the top of the blue waves. Then I took a toothpick and drew downward swipes to mix the white into the blue.
Absolutely love the look and texture on the water. I will use this technique again in the future, or when I’m feeling wistful and want to be reminded of the good old Shark Week days.
You can say I’m hooked on how these cupcakes look. While I can’t sink my teeth into them because they taste like tough cardboard flavored with vanilla extract, at least they’re visually appealing. While a great white shark can go weeks without eating, I can’t even go more than two days without dessert, so I’ll be back in the kitchen after this to make “safe” cupcakes from a gluten free mix. Maybe if I freeze these cupcakes for the 65th time, I can peel the tops off and place on the new cupcakes…because that cream cheese frosting is definitely worth taking a chunk out of…enjoy the greatest week of the year! ‘Til next time, my fellow sharks eaters!
Kate Bakes Cakes 