About a week ago I made these and haven’t had the chance to post until now since I hadn’t loaded the pictures yet. So here they are. 

The idea was simple. I needed an orange cupcake for the “Orange Crush” softball team end-of-season party. I wanted something awesome and creative, but most importantly, delicious.

So I consulted with our favorite cupcake guru, Miss Fiercehair. I call her to talk ideas over and eventually come to a conclusion. She asks the right questions, suggests the right ideas, and BAM! I get the idea. 

Tequila Sunrise Cupcakes. They’re orange and creative. 

So I found a recipe here, thankfully, because I had no idea how I was going to pull this off. I made a few modifications, the most important being that I divided the batter into 3 parts to add color:

I added extra grenadine to the red section, hoping you would get an extra burst of cherry when you reached the bottom. This didn’t end up working out, so if you’re hoping for that I would suggest adding a lot, lot more grenadine to that one. 

I also skipped adding grenadine in the icing. Again, I thought it would be a burst at the bottom – like in the actual drink. Sadly, no. I also just really liked the idea of having the bright white icing on top:

And as adorable as they were, I decided we needed a little bit more interest:

All told, they came out looking really great. They tasted good too, but the cake texture was really weird and you couldn’t really taste the tequila (which I did include, though you could easily leave it out). It didn’t help that they were a bit dry at the edges. Sigh. You can’t win them all. My family loved the ones I kept for us, and I never heard from the softball team what they thought, but I did get a lot of compliments on how they looked when I dropped them off!