Gloverly Cupcakes

It’s been a week since I made cupcakes so it’s about time I made some more. However, I’ve been too busy at work 😦 so instead of making some tonight

I got into the habit of making cupcakes for people when they leave the office (maybe I should be more positive and starting making them when people join instead!). I try to come up with a theme which is relevant to the person I’m making them for. These were for Stu and he loves cars so it was pretty easy to work out what I was going to do: a race track made of cupcakes with icing cars racing round!

Several people have told me that these are their favourites out of all the ones I’ve made so here’s how you make the decorations:

• colour half the buttercream grey and half green
• spread a thin layer of grey buttercream on the top of each cupcake using a palette knife
• put the green buttercream into a piping bag fitted with a “grass” nozzle (Wilton 233) and pipe lines of “grass” onto the cupcakes, leaving a “track” in the middle. I made 3 racing tracks out of the 44 cupcakes I had – this meant I needed 26 cupcakes with a straight track on, 12 corners, and then I used the remaining 4 as finish flags (which you can see in the photo above)
• mix some icing sugar with water so that it forms a fairly thick paste which can be piped and put it into a piping bag. Then snip the end off to form a hole about 1mm wide (or use a small nozzle).
• use this to pipe an outline for the track and dashes down the middle of each section of track. Pipe a start line on 3 cupcakes and finish line on another 3 cupcakes (assuming you’re also creating 3 tracks!)
• to make the 6 cars, I used fondant icing (colour some of it whatever colour you want the cars to be, some black for the wheels, plus leave some white for the helmets) – shape some of the colour into a car shape (keep it simple!), roll out 4 small balls of black for each car and then squash them to create the wheels, roll out one ball of white for each car
• stick four wheels onto each car, using some of the left over icing which you piped the track with
• make a small indentation in the top of each car slightly towards one end and stick a helmet on top of each car
• using a paintbrush and some black food colouring, paint a number on each car plus 2 stripes down the middle, and a “visor” onto each helmet
• finally…. arrange the cupcakes into a track and place the cars on top!
• p.s. I made the finish flags by printing out some black and white chequered paper which I then stuck to cocktail sticks

The actual cupcakes were a mix of chocolate, vanilla and caramel (recipe will be appearing in post soon) all topped with coloured vanilla buttercream.