I just finished making 50 cupcakes for our American Heritage Girls Christmas party. The theme was Winter Wonderland. The Explorer who planned the event for her Lewis and Clark Award wanted everything decorated blue with snowflakes. I was happy to assist.
I was inspired by the cupcakes I found on the ThriftyJinxy.com website (here).
I did make one major change… I used Royal Icing instead of white chocolate. I personally find that Royal Icing is “whiter” than the white chocolate and I really wanted the snowflakes white.
If you have never worked with Royal Icing before, it is not overly difficult. The secret is to keep all grease out of the icing. Using an assortment of decorating tips you can create piped figures (and flowers) that will harden in a couple of days and can be stored for later use. Be sure to make extra as they are very fragile and tend to break. If you place royal icing on a traditional grease based frosting, they will soften.
Two days before, I made one batch of royal icing (recipe can be found here). After printing the template found on ThrifyJinxy, I covered my table with parchment paper. I placed the template under the parchment and was able to move the template along as I piped the snowflakes with a #5 tip. One batch of icing was plenty to make all of the cupcake toppers (including extras for breakage) and to decorate my gingerbread men this year. Before the icing set, I placed one white sugar pearl in the center of each cupcake.
The day of the party, I baked 50 cupcakes using a traditional white box cake mix. Then I whipped up a batch of decorators frosting (recipe found here) and tinted it light blue. Using a large star tip (#1M), I piped a rosette on top of each cupcake. Before the frosting began to crust I placed one snowflake on each cupcake.
The shortening in the frosting will cause the royal icing to soften, so wait until the last minute to decorate the cupcakes. I decorated mine in the afternoon and they were fine for that evening. They were a big hit.
If you would like to use white chocolate instead of Royal Icing, check out this blog post.
