Cupcake Decorating - How to Make an Elephant Cupcakes

Making an elephant cupcake is easy and fun for kids of all ages. Kids love cupcake decorating as in a few simple steps they are able to make something they can recognise, something fun, and, as an added bonus, something they can eat afterwards.

As well as being great for kids decorating cupcakes is also great for adults, as it provides relatively quick and cheap entertainment for your kids / nieces / nephews etc during rainy school holiday afternoons.

Here we're going to look at how to make elephant faces for cupcakes, but further down the page are plenty of links for instructions for other fun animal cupcake ideas such as frogs, pigs, cows and ladybirds.

To get the best results from your cupcake decorating it's important to start with flat topped cupcakes.

What You'll Need:

1 x Round cutter slightly smaller than your cupcake.

1 x round cutter slightly smaller still (if you don't have this don't worry there is a work around)

Cocktail stick or skewer

Grey sugar paste

White Sugar paste

Pink Sugar paste

Black Sugar paste.

Cooled boiled water.

Method:

1. Cover your cupcake in either white sugar paste or butter icing.

2. Roll out the grey sugar paste and using the cutter which is slightly smaller than your cupcake cut out a circle and place it on the centre of your cupcake. NB: If you are placing it onto sugar paste use a dab of cooled boiled water to stick the sugar paste together.

3. Using the smaller cutter cut out 2 circles to use as the ears. If using cutters take the cutter you used to cut the original circle and cut a small piece out of each ear so the ears look like crescent moons. As you've used the same cutter to cut the pieces out as you used to cut out the centre circle the ears will fit perfectly against the side of the elephants face. If you don't have a smaller cutter to use then roll out 2 balls of grey sugar paste and flatten then until you have the desired shape.

4. Roll out a sausage of grey sugar paste roughly the diameter of the centre circle - this is the nose. Stick a small piece of pink sugar paste on one end and using a cocktail stick or skewer make two small holes for nostrils. Then using a knife or cocktail stick make a series of line indents across the nose. Tip the end of the nose up slightly and attach to the cupcake using some cooled boiled water.

5. For the eyes take two small circles of white sugar paste and stick them either side of the nose, then add two small balls of black sugar paste for the eyes.

6. To add a mouth take a small sausage of pink sugar paste and curl it around the edge of the elephants face under the nose.

You should now have one elephant cupcake.

Feeling inspired? Then have a look at some more Cupcake Decorating Books.