Keep little hands busy on a rainy afternoon with these cute fishy cupcakes from the Two Sisters Crafting blog. They can be easily assembled with shop-bought cupcakes and icing so that the kids can get stuck straight into the fun part; decorating (and eating, of course).
Ingredients:
Plain cupcakes
170g (6 3/4oz) softened butter
225g (8oz) icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
a drop of food colouring (optional)
To decorate:
M&Ms
Candy eyes or mini marshmallows
Directions:
1 First make (or buy!) a batch of plain cupcakes. If you are feeling energetic here is Donal Skehan’s excellent basic cupcake recipe.
2 Make buttercream icing by beating the softened butter, the icing sugar, vanilla extract and food colouring (if using) together with a electric mixer on low until fully incorporated.
3 Separate the M&M’s by colour. This was from a large bag of M&M’s. You’ll need about 15 M&M’s for the scales of each cupcake, and 2 reds for the fish lips.
4 Ice the cupcakes with the buttercream then make the first row of M&M ‘scales’ down the middle of the cupcake.
5 Continue adding rows until you cover half of the cupcake with M&M scales.
6 Complete the fishy cupcake with red M&M lips and eyes. These eyes are edible eye decorations but mini marshmallows with a dot of food colouring for the pupil also works. You can play with patterns and colours.