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Easter Nest Cupcakes
Cute, simple and fun Easter Nest Cupcakes, great for getting your little ones involved in the kitchen this Easter.
Active Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour
Decorating Time: 30 minutes
Servings: 12
Equipment
- Piping bag fitted with a grass nozzle
INGREDIENTS
For the cupcakes
- 110 g self-raising flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 2 eggs
- 110 g soft margarine
- 110 g caster sugar
- A few drops of vanilla extract
- 2 tsp milk
- 12 small cupcake cases
For the vanilla buttercream
- 100 g unsalted butter - at room temperature
- 200 g icing sugar
- a few drops of vanilla extract
- a little milk
For the nest decoration
- brown gel food colouring
- green gel food colouring
- 24 small chocolate eggs
- white fondant icing
- yellow food colouring pen
- flower sprinkles - or a flower cutter
INSTRUCTIONS
Make the cupcakes
- Pre-heat your oven to 160ºC/140ºC fan.
- Put your cupcake cases into a small muffin/cupcake tin.
- Sift the self-raising flour (110g) and baking powder (1 tsp) into a large bowl. Add the other ingredients (2 eggs, 110g soft margarine, 110g caster sugar, 1 tsp milk and a few drops of vanilla extract) and give everything a good stir until it’s fully combined.
- Spoon the mix into the cupcake cases, ensuring it is evenly divided, and put the cupcakes into the oven for 18-20 minutes. To check if they’re cooked insert a skewer and if it comes out clean then the cakes are cooked, if not pop them back in for a couple more minutes.
- Once cooked, remove them from the tray and move them to a wire rack to cool completely before decorating.
Make the vanilla buttercream
- Cut the butter (100g) into cubes and beat until soft.
- Add the icing sugar (200g) and a few drops of vanilla extract and beat until fully combined.
- You’ll find that the buttercream is quite stiff so add a little milk (about 1 tsp at a time) and beat until fully combined until your buttercream has a spreadable consistency.
Decorate the cupcakes
- Take ¼ of you buttercream and add some brown gel food colouring (add a little at a time as you can always add a bit more if you want to make it darker, but you can’t take it away!). Mix until the colour is even. Fit a piping bag with the grass nozzle and fill it with the brown buttercream.
- Add green food colouring to the remaining buttercream and once again, mix until the colour is even.
- Put some green icing on top of your cupcake and spread it until it is relatively even.
- Pipe the brown icing in a circle on top of the cake, go round about 3 times to add a little height to your nest.
- Put 2 chocolate eggs into the nest.
- If you’re making your own flowers – roll out a little fondant icing, use the flower cutter to cut out about 48 flowers and draw a dot in the centre of each with the food colouring pen.
- Decorate each nest with a few flowers.
Any nutritional information provided is the estimated nutritional information per serving. Please refer to my guide to Charlotte’s Lively Kitchen nutritional information if you would like to learn more about how this is calculated.