I saw these adorable mini cupcake pandas on my favorite sweets baker – Bakerella’s – website and knew I had to make them! After all, pandas and Asia tend to go hand in hand. And didn’t they turn out so cute!
I made up these two deep dish pie plates for my two usual Japanese Housing Agencies.
Overall they were a bit time-intensive, but only took one day compared to three days of cookie baking and decorating that I’ve been known to do. I must admit, I didn’t realize this recipe would make 52 mini cupcakes, though. (And for those of you who will ask, I panda-ized 36 of them. The others I topped with buttercream frosting and sanding sugar for Brandon and myself to enjoy!)
I baked my mini cupcakes in the morning, then let them totally cool over lunchtime. (This is clearly not a photo of all of them; just the ones I had sitting next to me during decorating.)
Bakerella has a great tutorial for these little guys, so I won’t go into great detail here. I piped buttercream frosting (first time I’ve ever made it!) on the tops of the cupcakes and smooshed it into white sanding sugar to coat the top.
Then came the Ghirardelli chocolate morsels as nose, eyes, and ears. I was thankful for the plastic blue tweezers that I used for my Christmas Tree Cookies of 2010 to help with the placement of the chocolate jimmies for the panda mouth.
After the first 5 or so, I determined that if I drew a “mouth” with a toothpick first, the jimmies stayed much easier in the frosting, as they tended to roll off the sanding sugar before I could get them pushed in far enough to stick. (That toothpick also came in handy for removing any stray buttercream used to adhere the whites of the eyes.)
If someone would have told me several years ago that I’d be using tweezers to decorate cookies, I would have laughed at them. Now I think tweezers are the handiest decorating tool for all those tiny, but adorable decorative details!
Did I mention that I sorted through my jar of confetti sprinkles to pick out only the white ones? (Wilton, why oh why don’t you sell jars of plain white confetti???) And then I used my gourmet food decorating marker from Karen’s Cookies (that I also used on my Halloween gravestones) to draw pupils on the confetti sprinkles. I started drawing the eyes in batches so I wouldn’t have to stop to draw during each panda. Drawing the eyes was probably my least favorite part of the process, but I think it added so much personality to the pandas, it was well worth the effort!
And the reactions I got delivering these cuties was well worth the entire baking and decorating process!
I love them individually (and they are so tasty and easy to eat – I think mini cupcakes are my new favorite dessert…for this week, at least!), but I love them even more when they are in a group where their personalities seem to blossom! They make me smile every time I see them. Bakerella is a genius! I highly recommend her tutorial!
Hope these sweet little guys make you smile, too!