I've been wanting to make geode cupcakes for a while now, and I finally had the perfect opportunity. My friend's son turned eight last week, and he absolutely loves geology. Geode cupcakes were the perfect treat to make for him!
These geode cupcake toppers are entirely edible, made out of gum paste and rock crystal sugar.
Rock candy sugar is always a hit with kids (SUGAR! PURE SUGAR!) and the kids loved saying, "Look mom, I'm eating a rock!"
These rock crystal geode cupcake toppers aren't hard to make, but they do require some drying time, so you need to plan at least a day ahead.
Geode Cupcake Toppers:
- gum paste (I like Satin Ice brand best)
- clear rock crystal candy
- black food coloring
- food coloring for whatever color you want the geode crystals to be (I used electric purple, electric blue, and electric pink)
- Everclear or vodka
- clear piping gel (optional)
- cling wrap
The first step is to form the outer rock shell of the geode. I mixed some super black Americolor gel food coloring in to my white gum paste, but didn't knead it in quite all the way, so there were variations and different grey tones in the gum paste. You can see how I knead and color my gum paste in the video tutorial at the bottom of this post.
Make a little nest out of cling wrap. Press a portion of the gum paste into a rough circle, and press the center of the circle into the center of the cling wrap nest.
Next, it's time to add the crystals growing in the center of the geode. I'd planned to use clear piping gel to get the crystals to stick, because it would grip the crystals well and help them hol don to the sides of the gum paste geode shell. But I can't find where I put my clear piping gel, so I just used everclear as my glue.
Everclear dries very quickly, but it activates the sugar in both the sugar crystals and the gum paste, and when it dries, glues it all together. It was definitely more of a challenge getting the crystals to stick where I wanted them to using everclear as my glue, but it definitely worked.
Let the geodes with clear crystals dry completely before painting the crystals, so you don't knock the crystals off the sides as you're adding color.
The color is painted on by making a watercolor type of paint with more everclear alcohol and food coloring. The everclear evaporates quickly, leaving behind just beautiful, translucent, colored sugar crystals.
I iced the cupcakes with some chocolate frosting, added some brown sugar for dirt and some chocolate rocks, and crowned the whole thing with one of the edible geode cupcake toppers.
I discovered pretty quickly that I needed to put the geode topper on before I added the brown sugar dirt, or the geode didn't want to stick. So learn from my error, and put on the icing, geode topper, then pat the brown sugar on the exposed icing around the geode.
Happy birthday, Austin! I hope eight is great--I know you are!