The Simple Addition To Grab To Dress Up Store-Bought Cupcakes For Any Celebration

In a pinch, it's possible to snag some cupcakes from the store and dress them up with a little DIY creativity. Since they're already baked, there's not much you can do with the cupcake base. These store-bought treats also already come with a swirl of frosting — so to add your own personal touch, a handmade decoration can be added on top. For this sweet treat hack, you'll need to grab some store-bought or homemade marshmallows and M&M's.

With these two ingredients and a pair of scissors, you can craft a gourmet-looking flower on top of the cupcake. To create a round petal look, snip a regular-sized marshmallow five or six times horizontally, still leaving the slices attached to an edge. Place a yellow M&M at the center of the icing, and then fan out circular marshmallow disks around the M&M, overlapping the petals to make a flower shape. Just like that, the store-bought cupcakes look like something from a bakeshop.

Adding flowers to the top of cupcakes or cakes is normally done with a frosting technique called piping. This involves adding a special tip to the end of the frosting bag, and forming the petals and center one by one. It can be tedious and time-consuming, so using marshmallows instead is a great beginner decorating method that doesn't require a lot of practice.

This simple decorating hack leaves a lot of room for variety and creative interpretation. For starters, you don't even have to stick to just cupcakes — this is one time-saving way to add customization to a plain cake. To style the petals in a different shape, rather than just round, marshmallows can be cut diagonally to create a pointed tip. Mini marshmallows can be used to make smaller flowers, which would look lovely distributed between larger ones on a cake. Since the petals will be smaller, you could also create a more complex, layered flower out of mini marshmallows, with several circles of petals reaching out from the center.

In terms of color, if you're not a fan of only white flowers, colored ones can be purchased, or you can color the marshmallows yourself with food dye. With colored marshmallows, don't skip out on green — these can be used to make easy leaves with the same diagonal snipping technique used for the petals. If you're feeling extra, the sticky part of the petals can be dipped in colored sugar, sprinkles, or even edible glitter for a pop of color and shimmer.

For the center, the yellow M&M looks the most like the classic flower image, but other colors are also fine to use. Chocolate chips and halved jelly beans are a simple substitute. If you don't want to buy anything else, a circular round of a colored marshmallow is another option, or skip the center altogether.