I am going to be making a 4" round cake and sculpting it to look like a cupcake. My question is, how do I make the sides look like cupcake paper?

you can cover the sides on buttercream, let it crust and then using a spatula or spoon make vertical indentation. hope that's clear.

That sounds easy enough, I'll give it a try! Thanks!

here is a pic I found on flickr which might help you with the sides if you wanted to cover with fondant.

Thanks for the picture but I'm not charging them enough to cover with fondant. Although it will be nice to have a picture in front of me while sculpting.

I know you mentioned sculpting it but I thought i would throw another idea out there for you. I did a b-day cake a few months ago and they wanted a jumbo cupcake on top. I purchased waffle cone bowls, baked 2 cakes in little corningware dishes, put one in the waffle bowl and inverted one on top. Then I frosted the top to look like a cupcake and added sprinkles.

http://www.cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1528142

Thanks! Good idea.

We were just at the beginning of taking our classes when we got the giant cupcake pan. We thought, GREAT, it's got the paper marking right into the mold.... silly us. Of course we couldn't just frost over it and have it work. But, what we did do was put a decent amount of frosting on the bottom then turned our spatula to about a 45 degree angle and pulled up from the bottom to get the lines. It took a little practice and we could have done better, but is this kind of like what you are looking to achieve? http://s314.photobucket.com/albums/ll426/ShelbyLynnCakes/?action=view¤t=7.jpg

I've never made a cupcake cake, but if I were and wanted to use buttercream icing, I would let the icing crust, then using a dowel rod in verticle position press into the side of iced cake. Just a thought!

I did that on my giant cupcake on my lady bug cake. The cupcake was made with the giant cupcake pan but when I iced it in BC I just put a thick coat of BC on smoothly and then held up a Viva and used a dowel(a wooden spoon handle would work great) to make vertical impressions all the way around. it worked splendidly.

I love that idea too, and will definitely keep it in mind for next time.