We have been ridiculously excited about this super pink reindeer cake tutorial for a while now! We partnered with Benefit Cosmetics UK to help get everyone in the holiday spirit with this gorgeous video how-to. If you LOVED our stylish Mrs Claus cupcake tutorial with Benefit last year then you’ll adore this! Whether you’re a novice or an expert this sweet treat is going to make THE cutest centrepiece!
You can view our full tutorial over on IGTV via our Instagram page (Yay! We’ve launched own own channel so expect lots more tutorials and filmed sneak peeks) or the Benefit Cosmetics UK account! If you’re more of a YouTube user then don’t worry we’ve edited the video so that it is lovely and landscape! Click the play button below to watch or head to our YouTube channel and subscribe!
And yes. We would put a gif together of the cake being stacked! It feels so magical. If only cakes actually did appear in front of us like this!
We decorated our end design in the reindeer cake tutorial with sprinkles, snowflakes and macarons. You can re-create our little arrangement or add chocolate truffles, candy or even fresh roses? Glittering star shaped cookies, chocolate jewels and even lollipops sound amazing too! If you’re feeling super adventurous (or brave) then a cute drip down one side and homemade candy canes would be so impressive.
Once your own reindeer cake is all dressed up and ready for party season it’s time to fill your phone with 1,000 photos of it! Hope you enjoyed creating one gorgeously pink cake! From us and Benefit Cosmetics have an amazing holiday season!
When it comes to companies that we LOVE Benefit Cosmetics are definitely way up on the list. They’re fun, quirky and we love the amount of pink they use! When they contacted us about collaborating together to create some fun (and chic) festive content we were thrilled! Plus we got to create a super exclusive collection of Benefit cookies for one lucky winner (giveaway now ended)! Head on over to Benefit’s Instagram to find our Mrs Claus cupcake tutorial via their story highlights.
Mrs Claus cupcake tutorial for Benefit Cosmetics!
Materials and tools needed…
Cupcake (if the top is domed and risen… even better)
Core and fill your cupcake(s) with frosting. We used a classic Madagascan vanilla buttercream for our cupcake! It’s absolutely fine to fill your cupcakes with other fillings such as salted caramel, cookie butter or fruity jams.
Tip! You don’t need to core your cupcake all the way to the bottom. Halfway down is a great amount of space for enough buttercream. Also, you’ll risk piercing the cupcake case so take it easy.
Step 02:
Use a palette knife ot spatula to spread any excess buttercream around the top of your cupcake which will help your sugar paste / fondant to stick to the cupcake’s surface.
Step 03:
You don’t need to do this step BUT it is our top tip for making smooth and flawless iced cupcakes! Roll out some white sugar paste / fondant and cut out a circle just a little smaller than your the top of your cupcake. Lay this central on top of your cupcake and smooth down.
As we said you don’t need to double ice your cupcakes and a lot of people aren’t too keen on sugar paste / fondant. However, for a super smooth look this part is pretty important. Cupcakes can bake uneven or bumpy too so this really helps!
Step 04:
Repeat step 03 but with whatever skin tone coloured fondant you like. Also, make sure to use a circle cutter a little larger than your cupcake this time so that it can accommodate for the curve of your cupcake! Apply and smooth over the top of your cupcake to the edges of the case.
Step 05:
With your circle cutters cut two smaller circles of white sugar paste / fondant. Then cut away a portion from one circle so that the other can fit inside. These sections are going to be Mrs Claus’ hair which is going to be so cute and on-trend too!
Step 06:
Attach on top of your cupcake with a little amount of edible glue to create Mrs Claus’ hair! Once this is in place dust with some white lustre dust to add a little glitz for the party season.
You can also use edible white lustre paint if that’s what you have to hand. There’s lots on the market like sparkling dusts, shimmer sprays and glittery paint too so you’re spoiled for choice!
Step 07:
Now to add a chic top knot! Roll a ball of white fondant and attach on top of your cupcake with some edible glue. Hold in place lightly until stable. Then add a little texture to Mrs Claus’ hair using a thin veining tool. Also, remember to dust her top knot with lustre dust.
Step 08:
Using a small ball tool indent where you’d like Mrs Claus’ eyes to be which you can nestle black sugar pearls into later.
Step 09:
With a thin veining tool indent eyelashes to the sides of her eyes. Three is always a good amount composition-wise, but it’s a lot for a small eye so stick to two ‘lashes’.
Step 10:
Now add black sugar pearls for the eyes with a tiny amount of edible glue. Try not to add too much glue as it can look messy if it seeps out or ends up making your pieces slide around! Edible glue is pretty slippy so just remember that a little goes a l-o-n-g way!
Step 11:
For her cute button nose roll a tiny amount of fondant in the same colour skin tone you iced your cupcake with. Attach with a small amount of edible glue.
Tip! Working this small can be a little tricky as your hands will warm up the fondant making it squishy. Once you create her nose just set it aside for a few minutes to firm up or cool down. It should be much easier to work with and attach.
Step 12:
Let’s finish Mrs Claus’ stylish hair! Use edible glue to attach pretty snowflake sprinkles in place. Then with a small amount of melted white chocolate (don’t use milk or dark… it’ll get messy and it’s so much more noticeable) attach a real bow in place!
Tip! White chocolate makes for a pretty sturdy edible glue for harder to attach elements… which is so handy for stubborn pieces. The reason we advise not using milk or dark is that if that drips all over your work it will stain. Not a good look right?
Step 13:
Add a smile with the bottom of a piping tip. We used the end of a 2.5 by PME Supatube then pressed it into the cupcake at an angle to indent a curve. You can also use the scallop tool in any icing modeling tool kit… which basically looks like a curved line.
Step 14:
Mrs Claus still isn’t ready as, just like anyone would need a touch of Benetint (or Posietint… our fave), she still needs her blush! Use a small fluffy brush to apply a little pink edible dust to her cheeks. Just like Benetint build your colour up so add a little at a time! It’s oh so much easier to just a little more colour each time instead of going overboard and having to start all over again from step 03!
Now Mrs Claus is ready to take on the festive season armed with her Benefit-inspired look! She’s the perfect guest at any Christmas dinner party too. A super cute idea would be to create lots of other cupcakes decorated with fondant bows to look like gifts. Arrange these on top of a cupcake tower stand and surround with pretty snowflake confetti for a scene stealing centrepiece!
Planning a fun dinner party with the girls? Why not tweak this Mrs Claus cupcake tutorial and make each match your bestie too! You can change hair colour and style, add edible accessories (try white sugar pearl sprinkles or stars for fabulous earrings), change their skin tone or play with make up styles too (add a little edible glitter eyeshadow or some black eyeliner with a black edible pen)! How much fun does that sound?
We had SO much fun working alongside Benefit to create this fun and festive Mrs Claus cupcake tutorial. We hope you have an amazing time creating your own at home. Remember… she’s not ready until she’s a #Benebabe!
Of course it wouldn’t really be Christmas if that jolly guy in the red suit didn’t pop up somewhere… and here he is! We created one fun and festive Santa cupcake tutorial for the wonderful people over at Craftsy to share. We wanted this little Santa do a little more than sit on a nice cupcake. At the time we began sketching ideas we’d just finished hand piping lots of birthday cupcakes with little painted parcels finished with royal icing bows. After piping what felt like 1,000 little silver presents AND doing the same for our Christmas tree tutorial we thought they’d make a fun idea for this cupcake design too. So, being the crazy people we are (normal people would never want to look at a tiny piped bow ever again) we made our Santa Claus burst from a pile of Christmas gifts! So if you’d love to re-create this Santa cupcake tutorial then visit the Craftsy blog now!
Jolly Santa cupcake tutorial!
We initially thought of toying with Santa’s famous red suit and re-creating him in gold, but obviously that idea was scrapped. Instead, we toned down the bright red of his famous Christmas uniform by adding in pink gift boxes. We also jotted down some notes on how to photograph him… lots of white, brightness, minimal styling and to try out different shades of A2 pink paper backgrounds.
If you look closely you can spot some rather glittery golden buttons down Santa’s coat. We had to work in some gold somewhere (other than a few of the presents and the cupcake cases). We re-created the cute buttons we made for our fondant gingerbread character tutorial a couple weeks back and attached them before painting them gold.
If you’re going to be re-creating our Santa cupcake tutorial for the holidays you can always leave out the cupcake, nestle your Santa Claus on top of an iced cake and surround him with presents and even a Christmas tree!
It’s definitely the season for a little bit of cuteness! Say hello to our rather glamorous little reindeer! It’s utterly perfect for cupcakes and cakes full of festive cheer… plus it’s super easy to make. You can even skip the addition of the tiny bow and bell if you’re a bit rushed for time or just want to add a cool scarf or some fondant holly berries and leaves. So get out those decorating tools and get making your own cute little fondant reindeer (or reindeers) ready for December 25th!
01: For the body mix some tylo or CMC powder into your brown fondant. Around 1 teaspoon per 250g is a good general amount. Then mould the ball of brown fondant / sugar paste into a teardrop shape with the thinner or tapered part flattened a little. Push a cut cocktail stick or spaghetti stick down into the centre of the body.
02: Indent angled lines from the base using a blade tool to create your reindeer’s legs. These should begin slim at the bottom of the body and angle outwards into sort of triangular shapes.
03: Now roll out some cream or pale brown fondant / sugar paste and cut out a heart shape with your cookie cutter. Cut off the top two curves of the heart and attach around the top half of your reindeer’s body to create a tuft of fur.
04: For the head roll a some brown fondant / sugar paste into a smooth ball around the same size of the body or even a tiny bit larger.
05: Now roll out some of your cream or pale brown fondant and cut another heart shape. With a little edible glue attach to your reindeer’s head. Make sure the larger or ‘fatter’ top half of the heart covers most of the head.
06: Gently skewer the head onto the body via the cocktail stick or uncooked spaghetti that you added in step 01. Make sure to attach the head centred and even or else it could make your reindeer lean or fall over later on.
07: To add some antlers onto your little reindeer roll out some ‘rope’ like pieces of caramel or mustard fondant. Add a small amount of tylo to your fondant beforehand to help them set quicker and stop them from sagging. Shape each piece into rough ‘F’ shapes (one of them backwards) and gently skewer onto 2 cocktail stick halves or uncooked spaghetti sticks! Add a tiny amount of edible glue onto the ends of the sticks and carefully push into your little reindeer’s head.
08: For the sweet little ears create a pair of teadrop shapes from your brown fondant and a smaller pair from the pale pink fondant. Layer the pink onto the brown and gently flatten a little before lightly drawing a veining tool down the centre of each and pinching the ends.
09: To attach the ears we indented tow small holes on either side of the head with a small ball tool, added edible glue into each and carefully held the ears in place until steady and secure.
10: For the facial features add an oval shaped piece of fondant onto the centre of your reindeer’s face with some edible glue and add a tiny ball of pale pink fondant to it’s middle top section for the nose! Then indent two eye sockets with a small ball tool and add in black sugar pearls for your cute little fondant reindeer’s eyes!
11: For the bow collar and bell take some thin ribbon and tie a tiny bow. Attach with a dab of edible glue and hold gently in place until set.
12: Roll up a small ball of caramel or mustard coloured fondant. Use a small round piping tip to create a short curve in the fondant ball and indent small circles onto each end of the curve to create a traditional looking bell!
13: Attach the ball in place with some edible glue. Now carefully paint the bell and antlers with your edible gold paint! You can change this to silver or even rose gold or copper depending on your colour theme!
Once you’ve finished your cute little fondant reindeer add to iced cupcakes, or on top of buttercream smoothed cakes! You can even create a a full team of them along with a jolly little Santa for one impressive selection of cupcakes! Make each of them individual with scarves, nerdy Christmas jumpers, coloured bows, little snowflake sprinkles or fondant leather collars!
There are these Christmas stockings that seem to exist in our heads and we’ve searched for them for two years now to no avail. It’s one of those moments where you think you’ve spotted them somewhere, but then you’re not sure if you completely made them up. These dream stockings would be utterly perfect for our office. We’d stuff them full of pink, white and gold (our brand colours of course) treats and wrapped gifts. Then nestle them on our shared desk like pair of Christmas obsessed workaholics. They’re gold sequin (obviously), but not that polyester lamé type fabric with fake sequin ‘stickers’ on it. Oh no. Glistening gold stitched on sequins. On top of this magical stocking is then a cuff of soft white fake fur. Simple really. Anyway, we settled for the (sort of) next best thing this year. Our dream Christmas stockings… as cookies. Plus we even put together a cool tutorial on how to create them!
01: One of the first steps is to dust off any excess flour from your cookies. This is usually left behind from rolling out your cookie dough on a floured surface just before you cut, chill and bake them. Any left over flour on the surface of your cookies makes them harder to ice. If left when you go to pipe your royal icing it won’t stick or ‘anchor to the cookie’.
02: Now with your 15 second royal icing (we used a mustard / ochre tinted icing so that is would be a lot easier for everyone to actually see this process in the photographs) pipe an outline around the main body of your stocking cookie. Don’t include the cuff area at the top.
Tip!
Always work one cookie at a time. If you outline all your cookies at once and then go to flood them you’ll be left with a visible outline that because it crusted over and began to dry won’t merge in with the flooded icing.
03: Now with the same 15 second consistency royal icing flood inside the outline. All you need to do is pipe your royal icing within the piped outline from step 02. To even and move around your icing use a cocktail stick in small circular motions.
04: Use your cocktail stick to pop any pesky little air bubbles that appear in your icing. These can also look like small dark ‘shadowy’ dots if they’re underneath the surface. Just use the pointed end of your cocktail stick to pop those too.
05: Now take your confetti sprinkles and layer on top of your royal iced stocking. You can even use star shaped sprinkles too if you have them. We work with two sizes (6mm and 4mm) of white sugar confetti sprinkles for our sequins. White is harder to find, but rainbow should work just as fine. Once added put your cookies aside to set.
06: Once they’ve set you can paint the decorated part of your cookie gold. It’s important to wait until your royal icing is fully dry as you’ll end up with a bit of a mess if you try to paint onto wet royal icing.
07: With your stiffer consistency royal icing pipe some messy blobs on the cuff section of your stoking cookie.
08: Add a furry texture to this section of royal icing using a cocktail stick to drag parts of the stiffer royal icing outwards. Once done leave to set. This could take anywhere from around 1-10 hours depending on the humidity of where you live. Sugar is hygroscopic which means it soaks in moisture from the atmosphere around it making it soften. The dryer the environment the better!
Yay! You should now have some gorgeously stylish Christmas cookies once you’ve decorated your way through an entire batch! Give your Christmas stocking cookies a little twist by using cute star sprinkles instead, try snowflakes and paint them silver or add royal icing holly berries and leaves to adorn the tops of them.
