Gloverly Cupcakes

I wanted to make some cupcakes which looked amazing for the bake off in the office yesterday to enter into the showstopper category. I’d looked through my Hello Cupcake book on Monday night but nothing jumped out so I asked Bertie in the office for ideas – she said I should make “the bear”… I think she was getting mixed up with Children in Need! But it did give me the idea of making Red Noses. This year’s noses are pretty cool and even have feet (they’re meant to be “di-nose-saurs”) but I decided making them 100% identical would take too long given I had other stuff to bake too, so I took the simplest one and based it on that.

Bertie also suggested that I should keep the flavour simple so I went for plain vanilla. I spent quite a while decorating the first one but after that, when I’d worked out the best way to do them, they were pretty easy. I kind of wish I’d spent longer on them and made them look identical to the real noses, and tried making the other ones too, but the judges obviously thought they looked and tasted good enough as they were, since they won the showstopper category!

I think they’d work well as monster cupcakes for a kids party, made in different colours with different shaped mouths and teeth but here’s what you need to make the ones I did…

• 12 cupcakes
• Buttercream
• Red fondant icing
• Black fondant icing
• White fondant icing
• Icing sugar
• Rolling pin
• Cookie cutter (just slightly bigger than the size of the top of the cupcakes)
• A small amount of black royal icing in a piping bag with a small plain nozzle fitted (I used a Wilton no.1)

And here’s how you make them…

• The first stages are similar to the baby boy cupcakes I made (more detailed instructions here) but essesntially you take 12 cupcakes and ice with a small dome of buttercream on top and then place them in the fridge to harden the buttercream slightly.
• Lightly dust the work surface with icing sugar and roll out some red fondant icing – I rolled it as thin as possible since I don’t like much – and then cut out 12 circles using a cookie cutter which is slightly bigger than the top of the cupcakes.
• Place a circle of fondant on top of a chilled cupcake – press it down and smooth the edge to reach the edges of the cupcake case. Repeat for all 12 cupcakes.
• Next, thinly roll out some black fondant icing and using a knife cut out 12 “bean” shapes for the mouths.
• Stick one mouth onto each cupcake using a couple of drops of water.
• Take a small ball of red fondant icing and using your hands roll it into a sausage and keep rolling until you have a long thin (about 1mm wide) string of red icing. Stick this round the edge of the black mouth using a few drops of water. Do the same for all 12.
• Roll out the white fondant icing, thinly, and cut strips out which are about 3-4mm wide. Cut these strips into triangles for the teeth – I made the top teeth long and thin, and the bottom ones shorter and wider.
• Using a drop of water stick the teeth to the mouth of each cupcake.
• Roll out 24 small balls of white fondant icing and squash them so they are flat, then stick 2 to each cupcake for the eyes.
• Using the piping bag filled with black royal icing, pipe a small dot in the centre of each eye.