Bunny Cupcakes

You’ve heard of Butterfly cakes, yes?

These Bunny Cupcakes are just a reworking of the tea-time classic.

You’ll need to bake a batch of delicious cupcakes: your way, your style, your tastes, then leave them to cool.

Next, you take a sharp knife and you cut into the centre of the cupcake, probably at the point that is halfway between the case and the centre. Cut with the blade pointing towards the centre of the cake, in a large oval shape, leaving a clear ring of cake around the outside.

You should then be able to lift out the section that you have cut, which will be a rough oval shape. Cut this in half along the long length to give you two “ears” (if you were making butterfly cakes these would be wings.)

I took the time out at this point to dip each ear in melted white chocolate and left them to dry in pairs.

Next, you fill the hole you have made in the centre of each cake. I used a great tool, the Pampered Chef Easy Accent Decorator*, to fill my cakes with Vanilla Icing (thank you Betty Crocker) in a super neat swizzle shape.

Then all you need to do is press a pair of dried-off chocolate-coated ears deep into the icing with the straight side to the middle and the curved edge to the outside, thus making rabbit-type ears. (Again, if you were making butterfly cakes, you would press the same shaped pieces into the icing, along the longer, curved edge, at an angle to the icing, creating wings mid-flutter.)

I added a chocolate bean nose and left them as they were. You could add more details such as eyes, whiskers and so on.

*Easy to use, the Easy Accent Decorator is ideal for someone like me who has an issue with her thumb joints, because you are pressing rather than squeezing, in order to extrude the icing. The apparatus breaks down easily into components for cleaning the tube and the nozzles, six of which come with the Decorator.

I found it easiest to add icing from the nozzle-end rather than the compress end, then screw on the nozzles. Then you depress the nozzle which applies pressure to the icing to squeeze it out. It worked very well and my icing looked a lot more professional than when I use a regular icing bag. That may be down to my pre-arthritic thumbs.

I would add a caveat which is that sometimes, the nozzle end popped off: I put this down to the thick consistency of the shop-bought icing I used. My feeling is that if you used home-made, and therefore softer, icing, this would not happen. Or indeed you could pipe cream or a savoury filling. At £26 it will be a definite regular in my kitchen and can be bought from the Pampered Chef website or your local PC representative.

 

*Disclosure: the Easy Accent Decorator was a gift given with no obligation to write a review. Yet it has impressed me, so I want to tell you about it. All opinions are my own.