Reindeer Cupcakes

Merry Christmas everyone! To get in the festive spirit, I decided to make some festive cupcakes.

Hence these Reindeer Cupcakes:

As you can see I made a few of them (16 in the end for an apparently 12 cake recipe, though I did cook them in a slightly smaller shaped tin than normal) with lots of different styles/facial expressions :D. They were very fun to make, especially making the antlers and the eyes. The cakes aren't a particularly chocolately recipe, so maybe adding more cocoa powder would help, or using a richer chocolate cake recipe instead.

Ingredients - makes 12 ish, depending on size

150g (5 oz) butter
150g (5 oz)  caster sugar
160g (5.5 oz) self raising flour
3 eggs
15g (0.5 oz) cocoa powder

Icing

100g (4 oz)  Icing sugar
50g (2 oz) unsalted butter or margarine
1 tbsp cocoa powder
if using butter, 1 tbsp boiling water

half a glacé cherry for each cake
pack of M & Ms (or similar)
150g (5 oz) plain chocolate

1. Preheat oven to 180*C. Line a 12 hole cupcake tin with paper cases.
2. Either process all ingredients together with electric beaters, or mix butter and sugar until light and creamy. Then fold in eggs. Then fold in flour and cocoa powder.
3. Divide among the cases, and bake for roughly 20 minutes, or until risen and firm.
4. Allow the cakes to cool completely. In the mean time, melt the plain chocolate in a double boiler. Pipe the melted chocolate onto baking paper or greasproof paper, ontop of a baking tray, in the shapes of antlers - make 2 per cake, and a few for breakages. Use the remaining chocolate to make pupils on the M & Ms for eyes. Put in the fridge to set.
5. Cream the butter and icing sugar and cocoa powder to make a buttercream.
6. Once the cakes are cool, for any that are too pointy, chop the tops off (and eat :D) to flatten them. Spread a very thin layer of buttercream over the top. Place half a cherry close to the edge of each cake. Place two eyes in the centre of each cake, above the cherry.
7. Once cool, the baking paper can be peeled from the antlers, and the antlers inserted into the top of the cakes just above the eyes.

I've also been making lots of sweetmeats (e.g. fudge, truffles, fondant etc) for people for christmas presents which have worked to varying degrees of success - the vanilla fudge doesn't seem to have a set, probably because it was boiling far too long to get to temperature. Still tastes great though. I won't say much more about the rest - they all worked fine (though I did end up making 90 odd truffles! :O)

Hope you all have a wonderful, and gluttonous christmas! I shall hopefully be producing some cakes for new year's too.



MMFC