Hidden Suprise Unicorn Cupcakes

Most people like unicorns right? They seem to have become a huge thing this last year and i'm not ashamed to admit I've been well and truly drawn in. I bought these cute little unicorn sugar plaques on a whim from Lakeland and i knew i had to make something fun with them! 

Ingredients -

 Recipe makes 12 

Sponge

170g self raising flour

170g unsalted butter

170g caster sugar

3 eggs

1 tbsp vanilla paste

splash of milk

Buttercream icing

250g unsalted butter (room temperature)

500g icing sugar

1 tbsp vanilla paste

Lucky Charm cereal (just the marshmallows)

Sprinkles of your choice

5 Wilton gel food colouring pastes - i used pink, yellow, green, blue and purple

Glitter, obviously.

Method - 

First things first, preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius and line a muffin tin with 12 cupcake cases of your choice. i chose white since the cakes were so detailed. Next cream the butter and sugar together either by hand or with a electric mixer, make sure its soft and creamy .Beat in the eggs and then add in the flour, a little at a time though mind you. Once everything is thoroughly combined add a splash of milk and a tablespoon of vanilla paste or extract. I like to use an ice cream scoop to pour the batter into the cases, it ensures you get an even amount in each one. Bake on the middle shelf for about 15-20 minutes, resist the urge to open the oven door though until the last five minutes or they will sink. Pop a skewer or a knife in the center of the cake to check the cakes are fully baked, they should be a nice golden brown on the top too.

Leave them to cool for at least an hour. In the mean time you can prepare the buttercream icing. Hopefully your unsalted butter will be soft and squidgy (but not melted) by this point, the perfect consistency for buttercream.

Cream the butter for a good five minutes until it becomes paler in colour, add in the icing sugar a little at a time so that your kitchen and you for that matter are not covered in a cloud of white powder. Make sure the buttercream is soft in consistency but not runny enough that you cant pipe neatly.

Before you ice the cakes scoop out a little hole with a knife and fill it to the top with sprinkles and Lucky Charm marshmallows. Next you need to grab 5 bowls and 5 gel colours of your choice, i like gel because they don't change the flavour or consistency of the icing. There's a few ways you can do a swirl icing, you could use 5 individual bags of different colour icing and pop it into one massive bag or you can be lazy and do it my way! This was slightly more messy if i'm honest but it did save on piping bags. I choose my first colour and using a pallet knife i scrapped the first colour onto the bottom of the bag, then i did the same with each colour, layering them on top of each other.

As you can tell from the above photo some of the icing gets mixed up but that's ok, pipe the first little bit out into a bowl until you start to see a swirl of colours. You can pipe using whatever nozzle you fancy but i like the Wilton 2d and i more often than not pipe a rose as it looks slightly neater and uses less buttercream. The sugar plaques were from Lakeland, the sprinkles from Sugar Shack and no unicorn cupcake is complete without a shit ton of edible glitter.

If you have a go at making these do let me know as i would LOVE to see them!

Until Next Time xo

SHARE: