Got grads in your life? They’ll certainly appreciate a round of graduation cupcakes in their honor, topped with adorable grad-themed sprinkles!
At the time of writing, it’s early spring, meaning we’re heading towards graduation season! High schoolers moving onto university, university students moving into adulthood…or onto more university, depending on their educational path! It’s always an emotional time, in a good way.
For those hoping to hold a graduation party for their favorite person (or themselves), these graduation cupcakes will become a smash hit. They’re essentially regular vanilla cupcakes—nothing complex there—but with the coolest, shiniest, cutest grad-themed toppings and sprinkles we could muster. Your grads will love them so much, they’ll want to toss them in the air like grad caps! Hopefully, they don’t do that. Ha!
Enjoy our ideas for graduation cupcakes!
Graduation Cupcakes: Ingredients & Utensils
To make graduation cupcakes, you’ll need…
Ingredients:
- Cupcakes or cupcake mix, as well as any necessary ingredients: These are plain vanilla cupcakes, so there are a couple of ways you can do this! You can make cupcakes from scratch, of course, using your own recipe or our tried-and-true recipe. You can also make them from a box mix and frost them yourself, or even get pre-baked plain cupcakes from the store and decorate them. It’s up to you!
- Frosting: As above, you can get store-bought frosting here or make your own. We have an easy-as-pie buttercream frosting recipe right on the blog.
- Sprinkles: Use black, silver, gold, and white sprinkles, or specially-shaped ones for graduation! If you want to mimic the cupcakes we have pictured, you’ll want to get our Grad Cap sprinkles, our So Fancy mix, our gold glitter stars, our gold sugar rods, and our silver glitter stars.
- Edible cupcake toppers: Edible…toppers?! Yes, they’re a thing, and we’re in love with them. Think printed decorations made of wafers…that you can eat! We have graduation-themed edible toppers for these cupcakes especially.
Utensils:
- Anything you may need to make your cupcakes and frosting: If, of course, you’re making them from scratch. If not, skip this part!
- Non-edible cupcake toppers: Unlike the ones we’ve listed above, we have a load of graduation-themed toppers you can’t eat, though they are food safe! (And pretty as all get-out!) Choose from our grad sayings or “GRAD” word toppers.
- Other graduation party and baking supplies: Like popsicle sticks for cakesicles, other sprinkles…all sorts of things for your grad party. (You ARE having a grad party, right?!)
Graduation Cupcakes: FAQs
Here are some answers to a few questions we’ve gotten about these graduation cupcakes…
How do I fill cupcake liners evenly?
This may not seem like it’ll make much of a difference…but filling those cupcake liners perfectly to the top makes for pretty cupcakes (and cuts down on waste). To answer this question, we have a whole post about filling cupcake liners evenly right here!
How many sprinkles do I need per cupcake so I know how much to get?
Another question that may seem simple on the outside, but, let’s face it, you don’t want to get too many (or too few) sprinkles. Especially if they’re for a special occasion and you can’t get them outside of that time of year! As with the above question, we’ve covered the age-old “how many sprinkles do I need?” dilemma on our blog.
Does the type of cupcake I make matter with this recipe?
Not at all. As we said, this post is more about the decorations than the cupcake itself. Feel free to use chocolate cupcakes or any other kind of flavor you adore! To mimic our photos exactly you’ll want plain/vanilla cupcakes, however.
Did you enjoy our cupcake ideas for graduation?
Whether you’re the one graduating or you have a loved one moving on to the next big thing in their life, these graduation cupcakes are sure to be winners! Comment with any thoughts you had on our cupcake ideas for graduation. Let us know, too, what other yummy things you plan to bake or cook for your grad party. We’d love to hear from you!
More cupcake recipes here at Sweets & Treats!
If it’s a cupcake-making kind of week for you (and when is it not?!), you might want to check out…
…or even just take a look at the cupcakes section of our blog!