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Save time and trees by cutting cake into squares and reducing the number of paper cups used.

This tip is for year-round, not just for holiday baking!

Yes, mini-cupcakes and regular cupcakes are all the rage but time-consuming, wouldn’t you say? First you have to seek out the perfect cupcake paper design and then buy enough to hold the 127 tasty treats you plan to bake. After you’ve prepared the batter, then you have to separate each paper cupcake cup and place them into each of the cups within the cupcake baking pans. Then you have to scoop batter into each cup.

Have you ever thought about how annoying it is to separate more than twelve of those paper cups and then scoop out batter over one hundred times? Tedious to the point of hand and wrist cramps.

Even if you are smart and you have a scooper and several baking pans — to cut down on the wait time between baking batches — you still have to spend time on separating the cupcake cups!

Well, instead of buying all those baking cups – in any size – for a massive baking job, just use cookie pans and spread out the batter. Then all you have to do is cut up the baked cake into squares. After you’ve added some frosting and placed the mini-cakes onto a plate or nice platter (not included in the picture here), no one will know you did it all in a snap!

Once decorated and put onto a plate, don't these mini-cakes look like more time was spent on them than in actuality?

The selling points to this method include: saving on the amount of frosting you would have needed to cover larger-sized cupcakes; saving trees by not wasting those dastardly little paper baking cups, and encouraging folks to enjoy without overeating!

If you are baking to donate to a fundraiser, you can put a few on display and keep the rest covered behind the counter. Then just place the tasty morsel into the same bag you would use for customers anyway. The great thing about this batch baking method is that you can make your squares any size you need!

For the frosting, all you need is one star-shaped tip and one writing tip, some food coloring, and a pastry bag. Folks recommend using plastic sandwich bags; they often burst or have small holes along the seams. Hence, go out and invest in pastry bags or get a box of disposable ones from a baking or craft shop. Heck, you can even buy pre-made frosting in any color if you are that pressed for time!

To sum it all up, the mini-cakes shown in these photos were baked in two 9×13 pans and cut with a 1″ x 1″ size in mind. The total yield: 180 pieces! Decorating them with icing took no time at all but looks like it did! That’s what’s called working smart, not hard…Enjoy!