Gloverly Cupcakes

Here’s the next creation ticked off my Christmas baking list – Reindeer cupcakes. I saw these in What’s New Cupcake and I wanted to make them straight away, but making them in the middle of summer wouldn’t really have been appropriate. So I had to wait. I’ve actually made them already this year – when my sister came to stay a couple of weeks ago we invited the family over for coffee and cake on Sunday morning so these were one of the things we made then. We even made a gingerbread sleigh and a Santa cupcake to go with it – I didn’t have time to make all of that last night though!

The hardest part about these is putting them all together and getting them to stay in place. It might be easier if you assemble them all in one go but I made them last night and then brought them into the office in pieces and tried to assemble them. This meant that the icing had all dried out so they didn’t really stick! So next time, if I was not going to assemble them immediately, I would bring in extra icing to stick them together or use cocktail sticks. I also rushed the antlers a bit and probably should have used a template so they all looked the same and tried them out to check that they would fit in the heads.

If you want to make them here’s what you do:

• Bake 12 large and 12 small chocolate cupcakes in brown cases (I didn’t have any small brown ones so I used orange instead – the chocolate cake showed through and made them look a bit darker)
• 1 batch of this recipe is the right amount to make 12 large and 12 small cupcakes
• For the mini ones, bake on gas 3 instead of gas 5, but for the same length of time – I baked the large ones first and then baked the small ones afterwards
• While the cakes are cooling make 1 batch of the chocolate buttercream from the same recipe
• Once the cakes are cool, using a palette knife, spread a dome of chocolate buttercream onto each cupcake – the small and the large ones
• Roll out some red fondant icing and cut into 12 strips about 1cm wide
• Place a strip of red icing across the middle of each of the large cupcakes
• Using some royal icing (coloured red) stick 3 small gold balls onto either side of the red strip, leaving a space in the middle for the head
• Press 2 small chocolate crispie balls (or pipe blobs of dark chocolate/use mini chocolate chips) onto each mini cupcake for the eyes
• Press a large red ball into one of the mini cupcakes for Rudolph’s nose, and into the remaining 11 mini cupcakes put a brown ball (I just used the red balls covered in dark chocolate – I looked for mini Smarties to use but nowhere seemed to have any but red and brown mini Smarties would work just as well as the sugar balls)
• Melt about 50 – 100g of dark chocolate, place in a piping bag with a small round nozzle and pipe out about 30 “antlers” onto greaseproof paper – you’ll only need 24 but it’s best to make spares since you’ll probably snap some
• Stick a head onto each of the large cupcakes, using a cocktail stick or some icing
• Once the antlers are set carefully stick 2 into each reindeer – gently press them into the buttercream on the top of the small cupcake
• Arrange them with them with Rudolph at the front and 2 rows of 5 reindeer behind (the 12th reindeer can either go at the back or go through “quality control” to check that they taste as good as they look)
• Finally, drape strawberry laces down the sides of them as reins