Love is blooming: wildflower cupcakes for a bride-to-be

Two dozen cupcakes for a bride-to-be, and not one of them decorated quite like another.

A different flower on every one

Each cupcake gets a smooth white top and then a small spray of wildflowers piped straight onto it — stems first in green, then the blooms.

There are six kinds going around the tray. Sprigs of purple lavender. Yellow snapdragons climbing a stem. Little orange trumpets. Blue forget-me-nots. Red poppies on thin stalks. Pink sweet peas.

They're piped freehand, which means the sixth lavender sprig is never quite the sixth copy of the first — and that's the whole appeal. Laid out together on the table they read like a pressed-flower collection rather than a batch of anything.

The trick with the stems

The stems do more work than the flowers. They set the height, the lean and the spacing, and once a stem is down you're committed — you can't slide it over. Get those right and almost any blooms on top will look correct.

What's inside

Vanilla and chocolate cupcakes, both with vanilla buttercream frosting.

You can tell them apart by the liners: pale for the vanilla, dark for the chocolate. Half and half, so nobody has to be polite about which they'd rather have.

Congratulations

Love is blooming, and so is the tray.