Christmas Cupcakes

A friend who is a teaching assistant wanted Christmas cupcakes to give out to her class when they broke up for the holidays.  These proved quite popular with their little individual cases!

Festive Cupcakes

Last night was a bit of a late one, I finally finished all my baking & decorating and managed to sit down at 12.45am!!....as well as finishing off Amy's 21st cake (see previous post), I made some festive cupcakes for OH's office as its their last day in work before Christmas.  Making of the cupcakes itself were no problem, the toppers were a little bit more time consuming!  I went with little penguins (once you got on a roll making them they were ok to do, but black fondant is messy to work with; it stains your hands and is very soft), holly leaves with silver glitter and red berries and green glitter Christmas trees.  I coloured some vanilla buttercream a bright green and swirled on top of the cakes.

I also made them some of my festive streusel mince pies so hopefully their last office meeting with morning will be truly festive!!

Only 2 more cakes to do this weekend and then that's me hanging up my apron for this year!

Happy Christmas x

Green Glitter Christmas Trees

Silver Glitter Holly Leaves & Red Berries

Little Mr Penguin!

Festive Streusel Mince Pies

Tis the season to be jolly!! Or rather, this the season to eat mince pies!! I love mince pies & would happily eat them all year round. This year I thought I would try to do something a little different with them so I gave them a streusel topping, added a little glitter, & voila....festive mince pies that last for all of two seconds in our house!!

Just use ordinary sweet desert short crust pastry, cut out quite a large disc & press lightly into a muffin tin (gives a deeper pie). Make sure the pastry is pressed up the sides. Get a fork & prick the bottom of the case & put in a heaped teaspoon of your favourite mincemeat (I add some good quality vanilla just to give a bit of depth to the flavour but you could put alcohol in if you wish), top generously with the strudel toppping & bake in the oven for 20 mins or until lovely & golden  at 200 deg.C. Delicious!!!

For the streusel topping mix 100g of plain flour, 50g of ground almonds, 50g of caster sugar & 1 tspn of cinnamon. Add to that 135g of cold unsalted butter that has been cut into cubes. You can either rub the butter in by hand or I use the mixer, either way you want to end up with a breadcrumb type consistency. There will be some larger lumps etc but I think they taste the best!! When all rubbed in add 25g of flaked almonds & 25g of cranberries & give a good mix.

Once the pies have come out of the oven & are fully cooled, give them a genourous dusting of icing sugar & a sprinkle of edible glitter if you have any to hand.

I wrapped them up & gave some out to people when I was giving their Christmas cards out as a little present

Enjoy!!