Christmas cupcakes

Santa is coming into the office this morning. In my view the only way to mark this very exciting occasion is with some cakes.

I took the opportunity to test a few different designs. I googled some images and then tried to recreate the design.

First up, and my favourite, reindeer cupcakes. I covered chocolate cupcakes in chocolate fondant icing which I rolled out, cup out circles and moulded onto the top of the cake.

The antlers are made out of melted chocolate that I drizzled onto a baking tray covered in greaseproof paper and left to cool.

The noses are made out of modelling icing - make into a ball and squash down - the ones I found online had sweets on but I didn't have any red sweets in the cupboard.

The eyes are small candy chocolates. They are from the toppings you can buy from supermarkets. I sorted all of the colours out and I had the most blue ones so that's why Rudolph has blue eyes. I then finished them off with a bit of black writing icing.  All of the pieces are stuck on with a bit of writing icing or butter icing.



The snowmen are almost as cute but I could have done with a little more time on the icing on the faces and scarves.

Vanilla cupcakes covered in white rolled out icing, stuck on with some melted apricot jam. The Faces are marshmallows covered in black and yellow writing icing. The scarves should have been red laces or red ribbons, whatever the sweets are called, but they kept unravelling and coming off so I used some red writing icing instead. Next time I would get some thinner red lace sweets and try that as I thought the icing looked too messy. Hats are jelly sweets stuck on with writing icing and the buttons are silver balls.



I wanted some adult cakes too that were quite simple so I chose red butter icing finished off with a white rolled out star.

I piped roses with the red icing and covered the stars with some pearl lustre to give them a bit more sparkle. Next time I will use white or green cases.



Finally I had some butter cream and cake mixture left over so I made two tree designs. One are normal sized muffin cases and the others are mini muffins.

 The larger cakes have green icing piped upwards to create the tree, covered in gold sprinkle dust and finished off with a red icing star. The mini muffins have a small green icing swirl covered in iridescent sprinkles and finished off with a silver ball on top.