Autumnal Owl Cupcakes

Hello Everyone!
This week's blog post is my second autumnal post and it's quite an exciting one as it's super cute yet easy to bake! I think this will be my last autumn post before I go into full swing Halloween posts, but I'm undecided so check back next week to find out.

So let's get started with these owl cupcakes...

The ingredients you'll need for the cakes are:

• 100g caster sugar
• 100g butter
• 2 eggs
• 125g self raising flour
• 25g cocoa powder

Equipment needed for the cakes:

• Lined cupcake tray
• KitchenAid
• Spoon
• Weighing Scales

 1. The first step is to preheat your oven to 190°C/ gas mark 5.

2. Place your butter and sugar into a bowl and cream together.

3. Next add your eggs, cocoa powder and flour, and beat until incorporated.

4. Once your ingredients are all mixed together, you can begin filling your cases. I like to do this one teaspoon at a time until I've used all the mixture.

5. Your cakes can now go into the oven for about 15minutes. You'll know they're done when they spring back after being touched.

This recipe will make 12 cupcakes.

Step 2

Step 4

After 15 minutes in the oven

While your cupcakes are cooling you can begin making the icing and to do this you'll need:

• 50g butter
• 100g icing sugar
• 1tbs cocoa powder
• bowl
• weighing scales
• spoon
• electric mixer/ KitchenAid/ spoon, whatever you want!

1. Place all the ingredients into a bowl and mix together.

2. When your icing is at the desired consistency and your cupcakes have completely cooled, you can begin icing them. To do this I didn't use a piping bag or anything fancy, I simply took my spoon and spread the icing over the top of each cupcake.

Once you've iced all the cupcakes it's time to turn them into owls! You'll need three things for this; 12 orange M&Ms/ Smarties, 24 Oreos and 24 brown M&Ms/ Smarties.

1. Separate the two layers of the Oreos so that you have one biscuit layer and the white filling. This layer will make one eye so you'll need 23 more.

2. To stick the M&Ms onto the Oreos to complete the eyes I squirted a bit on writing icing onto each Oreo to act as a glue, and placed the M&M on top.
If you don't have enough M&Ms or if you don't want to use them, you can draw on a 'pupil' with some writing icing or use some of the leftover brown icing.

Using M&Ms VS writing icing

3. Place both eyes onto each owl and stick an orange M&M in between them to resemble a beak...

Writing icing eyes

M&M eyes

...and your owl cupcakes are finished! 

I hope you enjoyed this adorable autumnal post and I'll see you again next week for a more spooky/Halloweeny post :)