Gloverly Cupcakes

I have so many things to blog about that I struggled to decide which one to start with. After the lovely spring weather this weekend though I though it would be appropriate to blog about these little hatching chick cupcakes first. I made these a few of weeks ago for Tom to take to a hockey match with him. As usual though I completely underestimated how long they would take and so they weren’t quite finished when he wanted to leave. So I gave him a lift to the match, drove home to finish them off and then went back over at the end of the match to deliver them. One thing I learnt was that the plain chicks were the least popular – all the others got taken before anybody took a completely hatched chicken. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t make them again – I think you need all three together.   Although I ran out of time making them, it wasn’t because they were particularly complicated, or take ages. It was just that I only left myself about half an hour. That definitely wasn’t long enough. If you want to make your own set of hatching chick cupcakes, here’s how:

1. Take a batch of 12 cupcakes (any flavour) and cover with buttercream to create a rounded top on each one. Leave to chill for a bit so that the buttercream hardens up a bit. If possible, try to save a bit of the buttercream and colour it yellow – place in a piping bag with a grass tip attached and save until later.
2. Colour some fondant icing pale yellow, roll out until it is fairly thin and then cut out 8 circles (big enough to cover the top of each cupcake). Put these over the top of 8 of the cupcakes and smooth down to the top of the cupcake cases.
3. Cut out 4 “flowers” (I used a small flower plunger) for the tufts of feathers and place one on the top in the middle of four of the cupcakes.
4. Add a bit of red food colouring to the leftover yellow icing to make it orange. Roll out a small amount and cut out 8 small squares. Place one in the middle of each of the yellow cupcakes and using the back of the knife make an indent across the middle, diagonally, to create a beak.
5. With the rest of the orange icing, divide it into quarters and roll each one out into a sausage shape. Pinch each end of the sausage and then cut toes into it. Using a knife, press lines all the way along the sausage shape and then cut in half to create a pair of legs. Leave these to harden for a bit.
6. Take some white fondant icing and roll out thinly. Cut out 4 white circles. Use a small star cutter to cut out two holes from each one (where the legs will be poking out) and then smooth a circle on top of the four remaining cupcakes.
7. Roll out the white icing again into a long rectangle and then, using a knife, cut it in half lengthways using zig-zags. Use the round cutter to cut out semi-circles with a zig-zag edge. You don’t want the two parts to create a whole circle when you put them together so make sure the zig-zag line is about a third of the way up the cookie cutter rather than in the middle.
8. Brush the edges of the four yellow cupcakes, without the tufts of feathers on, with a bit of water and then stick the white semi-circles on.
9. Roll 16 small balls of white icing and squash them to make small circles. Stick a pair to each cupcake just above the beak. Roll 16 smaller balls of black icing and stick to the middle of each of the white circles.
10. Finally, using the piping bag filled with yellow buttercream, pipe a little bit into each of the cut out star shapes on the white cupcakes. Then push a leg into each one.