Christmas time is over, however, I did bake during this time and wanted to show off what I baked.

So this year, as its been the trend of the ‘Unicorn cake’ (really thought I’d hate them but I enjoyed bring this weird creature to life in cake form!) I wanted to create a Christmas version, so, what else to do other than a Reindeer! (Rudolph, to be precise).

My first little project was a Reindeer cake.
For this cake, I made a classic Madeira cake recipe but substituted the 50g plain flour for cocoa powder and added in 100g melted chocolate. I then filled and covered it with a rich chocolate ganache(!!)

To decorate, I made little Reindeer ears out of fondant, I used teardrop cutters in 2 different sizes, cut one out in brown and one out in yellow and painted the yellow one gold before sticking this onto the brown one, I then repeated for the second ear.
For the eyes, I got some yellow fondant and a circle cutter, I cut a circle out and then cut a very small kind of crescent moon using the same size circle cutter. Once I had placed it onto the Reindeer, before it set I just moved the ends of the crescent moon shape to make them look like more of a closed eye. You know when you do your eyeliner and one always turns out better than the other? Who’d have thought it would be the same with fondant Reindeer eyes?
Then with the nose, I just got a big ball of red fondant, rolled it in red glitter, put a skewer through it and pierced it through the Reindeer body (how awful does that sound?!)
Then the Reindeer needed a collar and some bells, these were done, again, using fondant, the collar was a strip of fondant wrapped around the entire bottom of the cake,the bells were painted gold before being pierced through the collar.
The Reindeer’s ‘mane’ was done using leftover ganache, annoyingly, I wanted to use my star tip for this, but it was nowhere to be found so I had to stick with the only one I could find, I put the ganache into a piping bag along with the piping tip and swirled the letter ‘e’ over and over again.
I bought the antlers online, I wish I could have made them myself and made them edible but I did not know where to start, maybe next year I’ll try.
This cake was so tiny at only 6 inches tall!

For my next Christmas project, I made some Christmas Tree cupcakes. Christmas cupcakes
I used a typical chocolate cupcake recipe and made some vanilla buttercream and coloured it white using Wilton white-white icing colour. I put the buttercream on top just using the back of a spoon as it didn’t have to be very neat as it was meant to be snow.

I then got some ice-cream cones and cut off the top half and put it on top of the ‘snow’. With the rest of my white buttercream, I dyed it green and added it to a piping bag with a star tip. I then piped each individual ‘branch’ of the Christmas Tree. This is where it really started coming to life.
Next, I made the stars using yellow fondant and painted them gold.
I wanted to put some decorations on the tree before the buttercream set, the quickest I could think of was some dragees and use them as baubles.
To finish, I dusted over some icing sugar for a more ‘snowy’ effect.

I already can’t wait for next Christmas just so I can try some different festive treats. But then we do have other holidays to look forward to and maybe I will have other designs in my head that I can bring to life!

Kate.