When making crochet cupcakes it’s really hard to make the frosting look realistic. Your choices are either to make a flat circle or a flat flower shape – and neither of those really look like frosting.
I found this frustrating when I wanted to make a pincushion that looked like a real cupcake so that my sewing pins could look like little sprinkles. So I came up with my own technique for making crochet frosting! It looks just like icing that came right out of a piping bag, and any pins placed into the frosting look like adorable sprinkles.
Side note about the yarn colors: in the instructions below I made a “chocolate” cupcake with a yellow wrapper and frosting, so if you wanted to make one with the colors above I used Loops & Threads Impeccable Yarn in Soft Rose, Heather, and White.
Abbreviations
- MR – magic ring, it’s one way to start crocheting a piece in the round
- BLO – back loop only, this means that you crochet into only the back loop of the stitch
- Sc – single crochet
- Inc – increase
- Dec – decrease
- sl st – slip stitch
- FO – Finish off
- Rnd – round
- sts – stitches
Materials
- An F (3.75 mm) or E (3.5 mm) crochet hook (it’s such a slight difference either will work but I prefer size E lately)
- Loops & Threads Impeccable Yarn in Gold
- Red Heart Super Saver Yarn in Coffee, Cornmeal
- A tapestry/yarn needle
- Scissors
- Stuffing (I use polyester fiberfill)
Quick Comment on Gauge:
Gauge isn’t incredibly important for amigurumi creations, but I want to warn you about a mistake I made regarding gauge as I made this cupcake.
It’s important that your stiches in your cupcake wrapper are pulled a bit tighter, or stitched with a slightly smaller crochet hook, than those on your cupcake top. I accidentally did it the other way around and ended up with a cupcake that looked more like an acorn. Whoops!
I was able to fix it – but had to make a second cupcake wrapper and do a bit of surgery on my cupcake. As you can see, the cupcake wrapper with tighter stitches is definitely smaller and looks more proportional to the whole cupcake.
Don’t worry if it seems too small, when you sew the pieces together it helps to stretch out the top of the wrapper so that it stays bigger at the top and smaller at the base.
So make sure you pull your stitches nice and tight on the wrapper and loosen up a little on the cupcake top!
Wrapper:
Start with the Gold yarn
Rnd 1: sc 7 in a MR
Rnd 2: *inc* 7 times (14)
Rnd 3: *sc, inc* 7 times (21)
Rnd 4: *sc(2), inc* 7 times (28)
Rnd 5: sl st, ch 1, sc 28 BLO
Rnd 6: sc 28
Rnd 7: *inc, sc 13* 2 times (30)
Rnd 8: *sc 7, inc, sc 7* 2 times (32)
Rnd 9: sc 32
Rnd 10: sc 4, inc, sc 15, inc, sc 11 (34)
Rnd 11: sc 34
FO, leaving a 20 inch tail for sewing it onto cupcake top later.
Cupcake top:
Start with the Coffee (dark brown) yarn.
Rnd 1: sc 5 in a MR
Rnd 2: *inc* 5 times (10)
Rnd 3: *sc, inc* 5 times (15)
Rnd 4: *sc(2), inc* 5 times (20)
Rnd 5: *sc(3), inc* 5 times (25)
Rnd 6: *sc(4), inc* 5 times (30)
Rnd 7: *sc(5), inc* 5 times (35)
Rnd 8: *sc(6), inc* 5 times (40)
Rnd 9: sc 40
FO, leaving a 5 inch tail. You’ll weave this into the cupcake later.
Frosting:
This is where this pattern differs from most other cupcake patterns. Rather than making the frosting in one round piece, you’ll make a long snake of frosting that looks like it came out of a piping bag. Then you’ll twist it as you sew it onto the cupcake to give it a big pile of swirled frosting.
Start with the Cornmeal (paler yellow) yarn.
Leave a long tail when you start crocheting, around 3-4 feet long. You’ll use this in the assembly step to sew the frosting onto the cupcake. Ch 91 and turn.
Row 1: sc 90, turn (DON’T ch 1)
Flip your chain around in your hand so that the loop with your hook is now the bottom right corner of the chain, as shown below.
Row 2: for this row you’ll crochet into the underside of the chain. This means that you’ll work your crochet stitches into the underside of the chain stitches that you just crocheted into for row 2 (see the white arrows on the image above).
You may start to see it twisting a little – that’s perfectly fine.
Once you’ve finished your 90 sc your frosting should look like this at the end:
Flip your piece over so that you’re looking at the back side of your frosting piece. For the last row of your frosting you’ll be crocheting into what I call the “backbone” of the long chain you first made. Each white arrow in the picture below is pointing to a single backbone stitch.
Row 3: In each backbone stitch you’ll make 1 sc until you reach the end of your frosting piece. You should end up with a row of 90 sc.
As you’re crocheting you’ll see the frosting start to twist.
On it’s own it may not twist up very tight, but there’s no need to worry. You can manually twist it to create that nice frosting spiral now or when you sew it onto your cupcake later.
Once you’ve finished your 90 sc, cut the yarn leaving an 8 inch tail. FO
Using your yarn needle, stitch the shorter tail that you just cut once into the end of the frosting and pull tight. The picture below shows the positioning of this final stitch.
And your frosting piece is complete!
To skip straight to the instructions and tips for sewing on the frosting click here.
Assembly:
First you’ll sew the cupcake bottom to the underside of the cupcake top.
Start in the inside of the cupcake top between rows 8 and 9 about 3 stitches in from where you ended.
This round you’re stitching into has 40 stitches while your cupcake wrapper only has 34 so we’ll do some doubling up as we sew them together.
Stitch into the loop in the picture above and pull tight. Then put the needle into the next cupcake stitch and then into the next loop on the cupcake top. Pull the yarn tight. I’ll refer to this as a “single sewing stitch” (abbreviated ss).
Repeat this sewing stitch 4 more times.
Next you’ll do what I call a “double sewing stitch” (abbreviated ds). For this you’ll still put the needle into one cupcake wrapper stitch, but you’ll then put it through the next two cupcake top stitches and pull tight.
Alternate between the two types of stitches according to this pattern: ss 5 times, ds once, ss 4 times, ds once, ss 5 times, ds once.
Stop your sewing and begin stuffing the cupcake.
Then finish sewing the wrapper to the top with this pattern: ss 5 times, ds once, ss 4 times, ds once.
You’ll now be back where you started and the wrapper will be fully attached to the cupcake. Weave your remaining yarn tail into the cupcake. Then weave in the brown tail from your cupcake top into the cupcake as well. You should end up with a cupcake shaped like this:
Now for the frosting!
This step depends a lot on you, your placement of the frosting, and how you check and readjust your spiral as you go. It’s a lot more creative and less structured than most crochet patterns are so keep that in mind as you’re sewing your frosting on. I tried to get good photos to give you an idea of the general process.
Start by twisting your frosting snake so that the single crochet rows you made form a tighter spiral around the center, similar to the picture below.
Then you’ll want to anchor the end of your frosting to the top of the cupcake. Using the shorter tail you left earlier, attach it to row 8 just above where you wove in the tails for the cupcake top and wrapper pieces.
Next try to create the spiral of frosting on top of your cupcake, wrapping it up from the outside in. Guesstimate and get an idea of how you want it to look. You’re not sewing it on yet, just getting an idea of how you want it to look and where you need to stitch pieces on. This is something you’ll want to do periodically to make sure your spiral isn’t too tight or too loose.
Then start sewing the process of sewing on your frosting. Begin by twisting your frosting tight about 2 inches out from where you anchored it, place the frosting on the cupcake where and how you want it. Then stitch the underside of the frosting to the cupcake top.
Continue to twist and stitch down the yarn every inch or until you loop around back to where you started.
Every time you complete one loop around, spiral the rest of your yarn up without sewing it on so you can see if you need to make your spirals looser or tighter. You don’t want to get to the top and find that you’ve run out of frosting!
Continue stitching and checking until you have a space about the size of a quarter left to cover on the cupcake and 2-3 inches of frosting left.
For this last piece you’ll sew the frosting to itself. You’ll want to twist it so that one of the corners on the end of the frosting piece sticks up. This gives the pile of frosting a nice point and brings the whole thing together!
You may have some spots like in the picture below where you see too much of the cupcake between the rows of frosting. Work your way around the spiral back down from the top closing up these spaces. Close them up by making a stitch every inch or so connecting the frosting on either side of the gap together.
Once this is done, make sure you have the live yarn come back out one stitch over from where your short tail is sticking out of the cupcake.
Then push the needle through the stitch in between them so that both tails come out of the same hole in the cupcake top. Knot the tails together and weave in the ends. This process anchors the tails together so that they’re less likely to get pulled out of the cupcake.
And your cupcake is complete!
Whether you made a cupcake or another pastry with this swirly frosting on it, I’d love to see it! Go ahead and post your creations on social media with #lifewithbubbins so I can see your adorable creations!
