Gloverly Cupcakes

In my office, if you go on holiday there’s a tradition of bringing back holiday treats. However, I tend to bake something instead. Rather than using an ingredient from my recent trip to Borneo, I decided to make something related to what we’d seen.

We managed to fit in a lot – scuba diving, visited turtle island, saw orangutans, did trip to the jungle, climbed Mt Kinabalu… So choosing a topic for my cupcakes was tricky. However, on the jungle river trip we did we saw lots (and I mean lots) of monkeys. I had a few ideas on my Pinterest board for monkey cakes so I picked one of them.

I made 24 of them – 12 monkeys and 12 with bananas on. I was going to take them all into the office in my stackable cupcake box but couldn’t find it anywhere. It turns out that Tom “forgot” to bring it home after he took it to work. This meant I had to use cardboard boxes and could only take one on the train, leaving Tom to take the other box to work – something makes me think he conveniently forgot to bring the boxes home… He’s such a cheeky monkey…

 In order to make the monkeys I cut out some large circles of dark brown icing for the heads as well as 4 small circles for the hands and ears. I then cut out a heart from light brown icing and 2 small light brown circles (slightly smaller than the dark brown ones) to go on the ears. I stuck the light brown circles on to 2 of the dark brown circles and stuck them to the back of the large brown circle to form the ears (using a bit of water). I then brushed the large circle lightly with water and stuck a light brown heart onto it. I created a bit of “hair” to go on top of the head, made a small circle and stuck it on for the nose and then piped some eyes on using white and black royal icing. I left them to harden for a bit before putting them on the cakes – some of them were still a bit soft and ended up flopping about so if you have time, make them the night/day before. When you leave them to dry make sure they are rounded slightly – I cut the bottom off the large circles so that I could stand them up and rest them on the wall with a slight curve in them.