Reindeer cupcakes with pretzel antlers

I really wanted to make some time to do some Christmas baking when I had a day off last week as in the past I would have made several festive treats by now and I hadn’t done anything yet! 

These reindeer cupcakes are really easy, the key ingredient is the pretzels - and you can make the cakes themselves any flavour you like!

I made chocolate cakes using this recipe on the BBC Good Food site and made a simple chocolate buttercream.

When the cakes were baked and cooled I topped with a spoonful of buttercream and used salted caramel flavour chocolate coated pretzels (made by Flipz, available in most supermarkets) for the reindeer’s antlers. You can use regular pretzels as well but I thought these went better with the cake!

For the face you can use a Smartie or M&M for the nose but I didn’t have any and these were a spur of the moment bake so I used some icing I had coloured red and used a little piping bag to pipe on the rest of the face. Some of the reindeer have slightly odd expressions but my daughter liked them and so did my husband!

Reindeer Cake Pops

I made these reindeer cake pops for the children's Christmas party at work as I wanted to try out the idea for the design and also make something I thought would be fun for the kids. I did a cake pops course earlier this year and finally got the hang of making cake pops, so these were really easy to make.

As I didn't have much time, I bought a madeira cake from Sainsbury's rather than make my own and leave it to cool. I reduced the cake to crumbs, and then mixed it with some buttercream until I had a pliable dough.

I rolled the mixture into balls and placed them in the fridge overnight.

I had half a packet of chocolate candy melts in the cupboard, which I melted in a small jug so it would be deep enough to dip the cake pops into. I also added a tablespoon or two of oil to make the chocolate more runny.

I inserted cake pop sticks into the balls, and dipped them each swiftly  in the chocolate. I used a polystyrene block to stand them in while they were drying - they only took a few minutes to set.

 To make the cake pops look like reindeer, I broke some pretzels in half and dipped them in chocolate, though I didn't dip all of them as it took too long and I didn't have enough time for the chocolate to dry. In any case I think the antlers don't need to be dark brown and the pretzels are fine as they are. I used a red M&M for the nose, and stuck it on with a little of the melted candy melts. I drew on the eyes with an edible ink pen.

 I tried to break the pretzels to get a good antler shape, some worked better than others - I like this one.

I made about a dozen of these, and they really didn't take very long.

 They went down really well at the children's party and were as popular with the adults as with the children!

I'm sending these Xmas cupcakes to Alphabakes - my co-host Ros at The More Than Occasional Baker is hosting this month and the letter we have chosen is X.

The December challenge for Four Seasons Food is party and these cake pops were made for a children's party. The challenge is hosted by Anneli at Delicieux and Louisa at Eat Your Veg.

Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel at DollyBakes and Laura at Laura Loves Cakes has 'jingle bell rock' as its theme this month and so I will send them my reindeer cake pops.

I'm also sending this to Cakeyboi's Treat Petite as the theme this month is happy holidays, and these bitesized cake pops fit right in.