Merry Belated Christmas!

I’m sorry I haven’t been as active on the blog lately. I blame my holiday laziness, but I did whip up some cute cupcakes this past week that I want to share with you. I hope your families had wonderful get-togethers for the holidays these past few weeks no matter what you celebrate at this time of the year!

For a Christmas party I went to this past Friday I made two cupcake decorating ideas that I’d seen floating around the internet this past month. The first were these cute reindeer cupcakes:

And the others were these Christmas Tree cupcakes:

Both were fairly easy to make but took a long time to put together. For the less experienced decorator, I’d suggest the reindeer ones. I think even kids could put these together. The supplies you’d need to make these are a cupcake (made from scratch or boxed mix), chocolate frosting, Nila wafers, round candies in white, brown and red (I used peanut butter M&Ms for the brown and red noses and white coconut M&Ms for the eyes), black gel frosting for the eye pupils, and pretzels. If I were to do this one again I’d chose smaller pretzels. It’s probably pretty self explanatory by looking at the pictures how to construct them, but I’ll give a quick run down of how I put them together anyway.

First frost the cupcake and put the Nila wafer on near the bottom of one side of the cupcake, then use some frosting to attach the nose. Next shove the pretzels into the frosting near the top, almost to where they meet with the cookie. It was hard to keep the pretzels from slumping over that’s why I put them so far down on the face. If you use smaller pretzels, this may not be necessary. Then attach the eyes with more frosting near the top of the cookie. Unless you want them to be blind reindeer, add a little black pupil to each eyeball with the gel frosting.

For a little more of a challenge I made these Christmas tree cupcakes as well. These ones require a little bit of frosting technique and frosting tips.  Start with a cupcake frosted with white frosting. For the structure of the tree place an ice cream sugar cone upside-down on the white frosting. Then make some green frosting and pipe it on using a closed star tip. Just rest the tip near the ice cream cone and then pull outward as you push the frosting out to make it look like the branchy peaks on the tree.

For decorating the tree you can do a wide variety of things! Some ideas are chocolate covered sunflower seeds, sprinkles, small candies like mini M&Ms, etc. I used some light blue pearl candy sprinkles I had on hand but the decorations are limitless.  You could even try  to find a star shaped candy as a tree topper.

If you made cupcakes for the holidays this year I’d love to see them! You can either post a link to them in a comment below or post a picture on my Facebook page!