Okay, so I saw these really cute snowman cupcakes on All You’s site and wanted to make them for a snowman themed holiday party. They didn’t seem that hard … or so I thought. I made cupcakes and decorated them with cute little snowman faces. I felt a little more confident at this point, because I figured making cute faces would be the hardest part. I coated Nilla wafers just like the recipe stated. After I finished coating them, I was starting to rethink my decision to make these cupcakes in the first place because it was tedious. I could have sworn that at one point Nabisco made mini Nilla wafers in colors so I could have avoided this step, but no such luck. Now it was time to put the crowning glory on these adorable snowmen, the earmuffs. Oh how cute they were going to be and I was getting excited.
Call it divine intervention if you will, but it was a good thing that I decided at this moment to have a lack of faith in my abilities and I grabbed one cupcake as a test.
So, all I had left was to attach the earmuffs. I looked at the picture and read the directions on how to make the earmuffs with a licorice band. The picture and the instructions didn’t look like they matched, but it was all I had. I cut the licorice and inserted each end in the cupcake. I had added the toothpick like in the picture as well. It still didn’t look very stable, but I figured that’s what the directions said, so I’d go with it. I picked up a sugar coated wafer to cover up where the licorice and the cupcake met. I delicately placed it on top and repeated this for the other side. I stood back to admire my handiwork and that’s when it happened.
BOOM!
(Okay, well not BOOM, but if a real snowman exploded and someone was there to hear it, that’s the sound it would have made.) There were cupcake bits all over the place. I felt like I was watching it happen in slow motion. The licorice pulled outward and broke the liner away from the cupcake, pulling the cookie, frosting and cake bits with it. The snowman cupcake now looked like the elephant man cupcake. It wasn’t pretty.
Apparently, the first law of licorice is that licorice that is made straight has a tendency to stay straight. (This was new licorice too.) After I got over the initial shock of the disfigured cupcake, I decided that the All You picture must have been done with super glue to hold the licorice in place. For me, it’s the equivalent of airbrushing a model’s legs or something … making a pretty picture look alluring and achievable, but in reality it’s not. If anyone knows the secret to getting the licorice into a cupcake, I hope you will share.
Thankfully the rest of the cupcakes were not harmed and made it to the party, albeit, slightly less dressed for winter.
Snowman cupcakes The Memory Fairy 2011
