Edible Ornaments

Colorful, whimsical and just plain fun, Hello, Cupcake! Irresistibly Playful Creations Anyone Can Make, by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson (Houghton Mifflin, $15.95 trade paperback, 230 pages), is one of my favorite cookbooks of 2008.

It’s filled with imaginative projects. Follow the fairly simple directions, and you can create a plateful of cupcakes that look like spaghetti and meatballs, for example. Ferrero Rocher hazelnut candies are the “meatballs,” and strawberry preserves are the “sauce.” The noodles? A can of vanilla frosting, lightly tinted with 1/2 teaspoon cocoa powder, piped through an 1/8-inch hole snipped in the corner of a zip-top bag. I posted another fun project, corn-on-the-cob cupcakes, on my blog last summer.

Or celebrate the holiday season with these bright cupcakes.

EDIBLE ORNAMENTS
Yield: 24 servings

8 vanilla cupcakes baked in red paper liners
8 vanilla cupcakes baked in green paper liners
8 vanilla cupcakes baked in white paper liners
2 (12-ounce) cans whipped vanilla frosting
1/2 cup each green, light green, red, yellow and white decorating sugars (available at baking supply stores and online)
24 yellow spice drops
Black licorice laces, cut into twenty-four 1 1/4-inch pieces
24 thin pretzel sticks
Assortment of colored fruit chews and fruit leather (Laffy Taffys, Airheads, Starbursts, Fruit by the Foot)
Red licorice laces (Twizzlers Pull-n-Peel)
1 cup mini candy-coated chocolates (M&M’s Minis)
Cinnamon red hots or candy decors

1. Spoon 1/2 cup of the vanilla frosting into a ziplock bag, press out the excess air, seal, and set aside.

2. Place the decorating sugars in separate small shallow bowls. Spread the tops of all the cupcakes with frosting, mounding it slightly. Starting at the edge, roll the top of each cupcake in one of the sugars to coat completely.

3. To make the top of the ornament, use a round toothpick to poke a hole in each end of one of the spice drops. Bend one of the black licorice pieces in half and insert both ends into the hole in the bottom of the spice drop to make a loop. Insert one end of a pretzel stick into the hole in the rounded top of the spice drop, pushing it in about 1/2 inch. Press the other end of the pretzel all the way into one of the cupcakes. Repeat with the remaining cupcakes.

4. Roll out the fruit chews on a piece of waxed paper to 1/8 inch thick. Use a pastry wheel, clean craft scissors or regular scissors to cut the fruit chews and fruit leather into decorative pieces. Arrange the fruit-chew pieces, fruit leather and red laces on top of the cupcakes to make stripes, bands and lines. Snip a 1/8-inch corner from the bag with the vanilla frosting and pipe dots in different patterns over the cupcakes and on top of the fruit chews. Press the chocolate candies, red hots and cinnamon decors into the frosting to secure.

5. Set the cupcakes in another paper liner and place in small boxes or on a serving platter.