Gloverly Cupcakes

Where do I start? This weekend my sister Becky came up to stay and we had a non-stop baking weekend so I’ve got so many things to blog about. I’m going to start with these shoes. Our first baking project was to make a cake for Kiri’s birthday party on Saturday night. Kiri LOVES shoes so when she asked me to make a birthday cake for her I knew exactly what I would make. I’d seen a photo of cupcake shoes on this website ages ago and I’d been looking for a reason to make them – Kiri’s birthday was the perfect occasion.

However, why make just make big cupcake shoes, if  you can also make mini ones?! We gave ourselves way too much to do but somehow managed to get everything done… just. The shoes were vanilla cupcakes topped with chocolate egg nog buttercream (which we’d made to go on some Christmas cupcakes we also made) covered in coloured fondant icing, with gingerbread biscuit soles and wafer heels.

If you want to attempt to make them, here’s how:

•  pile up a heap of icing on top of each cupcake to create a dome which will be the end of the shoe
• put the shoes in the fridge to harden the icing slightly so that it’s easier to cover in fondant icing
• once the icing had hardened, roll out a circle of coloured fondant icing (chose what even you like depending on what shoes you want to make) and cut in in half
• place half on top of each cupcake with the straight edge along the top of the pile of icing so it covers the whole of the dome of icing
• push the edges of the icing down over the cupcake case so that the excess icing breaks off and creates a smooth edge
• roll out a circle of black fondant icing (or a different colour depending on what colour you want the soles to be) and then cut it in half
• place half on top of each cupcake on the side with no icing so that the straight edge meets the straight edge of the coloured icing on top of the shoe – smooth it over the edge of the cupcake case again
• for the sole, cut out long triangle with a rounded end (I don’t know how else to describe the shape!) from gingerbread, bake and when cool cover in fondant icing – I put a bit of royal icing onto the biscuits to get the icing to stick and then for the big shoes I stuck a strip of red icing round the edge of the biscuit
• to assemble the shoes, take a wafer curl (cut it in half for the mini shoes) and stick a ball of fondant icing on top of it and then put a blob of royal icing on top of that
• stick the end of the biscuit to the icing on the top of the wafer
• pipe a line of royal icing along the bottom of the biscuit and then stick it to the cupcake and then you’ll have a shoe!