DIY camouflage cupcakes for a camo themed birthday

The boys recently celebrated their 5th and 7th birthdays. Since their birthdays are so close we, like past years, did joint celebration(s). This year things were more low key (thanks a lot, 2020/2021 – you stink) and we did a couple of small celebrations instead of one large one. We still had lots of fun and as a bonus that meant they got to have more yummy food and desserts! They are very into all things military right now so I made DIY camouflage cupcakes for one of their parties.

This was a fun challenge for me! I’ve done lots of cake decorating in the past but I’ve always just used my standard cake recipe and all the decorating was on the top/outside. This was the first time I did anything special with the cake itself.

I will say, it was a trade off. The cake recipe that I use and love is very, very liquid-y and would not work for this type of cake. In order to get a white cake batter and a chocolate cake batter with the same consistencies for the camo effect I had a compromise on taste a bit and use doctored up boxed cake mixes. It was fine, not terrible, but definitely not the rich, moist cake I prefer. Totally worth it to see how excited the boys were though!

As far as difficulty goes, this was an easy but time consuming project. Not having to do elaborate decorations on the top cut down on the time and stress of making the cake, so that was nice. Making the camo cupcakes took a while though because of all the different batter colors!

I didn’t do a full blown tutorial but I did take a few pictures so I could share a mini one. I used some other tutorials/blog posts as inspiration so check them out if you need more ideas (this one and this one)

To start, you need two cake batters – one white and one chocolate. You could also do all white and use brown food coloring but I went with one white, one chocolate (be aware this is going to make a LOT of cupcakes since you’re using 2 batters!)

Once you mix up both of your batters take part of your white batter and add green food coloring. Take another part of your white batter and mix it with the chocolate to get a light brown. You’ll also want some untouched white batter for the white and some untouched chocolate for the dark brown (I ended up adding some additional brown food coloring to the plain chocolate one to better distinguish it from the chocolate/white mix)

So in all you should end up with 4 batters:

white
green (white batter + green food coloring)
light brown (white and chocolate batters mixed)
darker brown (plain chocolate, or chocolate plus additional brown food coloring)

Then start putting them in the muffin tin. You can use a spoon and scoop it in, but I used some of those condiment squeeze bottles (like these, except mine came from Kroger), filled them with the four types of batter, and then used them to squeeze into the pan. Filling the squeeze bottles took some extra time but I think it really cut down on the mess that potentially could have gotten all over the pans so it was worth it.

I didn’t follow a specific pattern. I had way more plain chocolate batter than white (since the white got split between white, green, and light brown) so I usually started by filling the very bottom of each cupcake plain chocolate, then used my squeeze bottles to squeeze various blobs of the other colors. I was afraid they would mix a ton but they stayed pretty much where I put them.

Here’s what some of the tops looked like once they were baked.

Here’s what the inside of one of them looked like

For the icing I mixed up one batch of my usual white buttercream icing and one batch of my chocolate buttercream. I used green food coloring to turn half of the white batter green.

I wasn’t quite sure how to pipe the colors to make it look like camo but after some trial and error what I ended up doing was:

Fill three piping bags – one white, one green, one brown. No tips on these three bags, just snip off the end to make an opening.
Use a 4th bag as the main piping bag with the desired icing tip (Wilton 2D is my preferred choice for cupcakes)
I held my main piping bag and then took each of my 3 separate colors, squeezed a blob of each color down into the main bag kind of in 3rds. So, not layers (white, then green, then brown), but more like white down one side, rotate a bit and put green down another side, rotate and put brown on another side. That way when I squeezed through the tip a little bit of each color came out the whole time. I didn’t think to take pictures to explain this part, sorry!

Once I figured out my method, the camo icing was easy peasy.

I topped the cupcakes with some army men and army themed toothpicks (both found at Hobby Lobby). The cupcake wrappers were also camo and we had camo candles for the boys to blow out (again, all from Hobby Lobby)

I’m so happy with how they turned out!

Although the not-as-tasty cake trade off for the cool camo effect was worth it, I was also happy that we had another birthday celebration where I was able to make my usual chocolate cake with chocolate icing. We reused the army men from the cupcakes and I let the boys set them up on the cake however they wanted to. They enjoyed getting to do that!