Mickey Cupcakes

My best friend loves anything Disney.  She also loves Reese's.  I had convinced her to let me make her a birthday goodie, which was originally going to be a birthday cake.  Well, by the time I left my cake keeper lid at home instead of bringing it to my apartment for probably the fourth time, I decided that a cake was starting to get tricky.  Then I realized I had no offset spatula to use with icing, and I quickly decided that cupcakes were more reasonable and transportable.

 Regardless, as some of you may know from previous posts, I am a BIG fan of edible and TASTY decorations.  Sure, I love a good gum paste lily for a wedding cake, because they are beautiful and look delicate.  But let's face it, they taste awful.  When I was brainstorming ideas for my best friend's cake, I had thought about how large Reese's and small Reese's should essentially make a Mickey.

Now, it very well might have been more reasonable to use miniature Reese's partnered with Reese's Minis.  And I had every intention to do that...until I got to the checkout lanes an went through a U-Scan, completely forgetting that I needed to find a small bag of minis up there...

Oh well, I don't think they taste as good anyway.  I originally tried cutting the big cups in half to make them go twice as far...but that just made the cupcake look like a creepy, frowny, alien from DOOM or something.

The moral of the story here is use large, whole Reese's cups and two miniature cups to make a Mickey. I did not waste the ones I had cut in half, and instead put them in the cupcake with sprinkles around them.  I found these sprinkles at a local cake shop, so I am not really 100% sure where to tell you to look around you.  If you have a local cake shop, they might just have them.  If not, I am sure you can find these online if you really need them. 

These cupcakes are iced in a peanut butter icing, a chocolate icing, and two are both icings mixed.  For the peanut butter icing I used 1/4C crisco (butter is fine too, crisco will hold up a little better in a bipolar apartment like mine), 1/2 C peanut butter, and 3/4 lb of powdered sugar, plus a bit of water.  You may choose to start at just half a pound of sugar, because I will be the first to admit I make notoriously stiff icings.  This is what I get for whining so much when we are doing a wedding cake and the icing is really stiff and hard to pipe. HOWEVER, I do like how well and quick a stiff icing sets.  I whip all my ingredients in my kitchenaid, adding water a little at a time, until it comes together in a fluffy icing.  The two icings I used combined were just about enough to do the 24 cupcakes, with a little peanut butter icing leftover.

If you make a stiff icing, you basically need to ice a cupcake, decorate it right then.  Don't give it time to set because you want it to hold your decorations on. 

For the chocolate I used half a can of chocolate icing, and half a box (so 1/2lb) of powdered sugar.  I really hate most canned icing on the market because I can tell it is starting to get made with cheaper and more fake flavors.  I used to be able to eat cream cheese icing from a can, but it pretty much tastes weird now and I find it disturbing.  Most of them taste a lot more oily to me as well.  However, I do realize that with the logistics of a small apartment, canned icing can save me some time and mess. I am actually ok with the chocolate icing still, the milk chocolate icing does have a pretty good flavor, but by whipping it up with powdered sugar it makes it more like an icing and less like flavored crisco.

I made the mixed cupcakes after I had iced the rest.  I was almost out of chocolate icing, so I plopped a big scoop of peanut butter icing into the bag I was using.  As I piped it created a somewhat swirly looking icing, and it really does taste just like a Reese's cup.  You could go to all the work to put icing in two bags and thread them through a third, but I consider this a huge waste of bags.  Stiff icings should stay relatively in place, so if you spoon some in with a spatula, raking it against one side of the bag, you should have an easy enough time doing the same with the other icing on the other side of the bag.