Christmas cupcakes and gingerbread town are the most popular holiday desserts. So why not to combine them together? Flavorful chocolate cupcakes with homemade orange filling, cream cheese frosting, decorated with gingerbread houses.
Use a knife or small cookie cutters to cut different gingerbread houses (ones with smoking chimney, other without and so on) and Christmas trees. Also cut some small rectangles to make fence and tile road. Make more than 11 gingerbread houses, 11 Christmas trees and 25 road tiles or fences to test and complete the town.*
Prepare baking tray, lined with parchment paper. Put your gingerbread cookies on the tray, leaving some space between the cookies.
Bake around 8-10 minutes. Small gingerbread tiles will bake faster, around 5-6 minutes, so make sure to remove them from the tray earlier.
Cool gingerbread cookies completely.
Add half a cup of icing sugar, a pinch of salt in a small bowl and start mixing in half tablespoon of milk until smooth. Adjust by adding more icing sugar or drops of milk until you have perfect icing consistency. It should be pour-able, but very thick. Drizzle a little from the spoon, if it holds its shape for 6-8 seconds before melting back to icing, it is ready.
187 g flour, 1 cup icing sugar (confectioners'), 1 tbsp milk, 1 pinch salt
Fill the icing in a pastry bag with metal tip and try it on the piece of parchment paper. Draw a line and see if it holds the shape. Draw the border lines on the cookies and let them dry for at least half an hour.
Then start decorating the inside of the cookies. Make dots and garlands on the Christmas trees. Draw roof tiles, snowmen roofs, windows and doors on the houses. Fill the smoke completely white, helping to distribute icing with a toothpick. Draw stripes and tiles on the “road” cookies.
Let the icing dry completely overnight, best time would be 20 hours.
Chocolate cupcakes
Preheat oven to 355 F / 180 C
Mix all dry ingredients in one bowl.
187 g flour, 100 g sugar, 65 g cocoa powder, 3/4 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp salt
Whisk all wet ingredients in another bowl.
2 eggs, 180 g buttermilk, 187 g water, 54 g vegetable oil
Make a well in the center of mixed dry ingredients and slowly add half of wet ingredients. Combine until incorporated, then add leftover liquid ingredients and combine until you have no lumps.
Prepare cupcake or muffin tray with cupcake liners. Fill until the top with batter.
Bake about 30 minutes or until inserted wooden toothpick comes out clean.
Cool cupcakes completely before filling and frosting them.
Orange filling
Squeeze fresh orange juice from oranges in a small pot.
2 oranges
Add sugar, cinnamon, ginger and cornstarch, mix until combined.
Put the pot on the low heat. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring, then remove from heat and sieve in the other bowl.
Add butter cubes one by one, mixing until melted completely. Cover with plastic wrap or lid and let it cool completely.
50 g butter
To fill the cupcakes, prepare a piping bag with decorating tip. Add orange curd in a bag. Insert the tip in the top and center of the cupcake and push it down. Don’t make a hole in the bottom of the cupcake, or the filling will drip off.
Squeeze the filling in the cupcake, moving the bag upwards until you reach the top of cupcake. Smooth the leftover leaking curd on top of cupcake with a spoon or spatula.
White frosting
Whip heavy cream for 5 minutes until stiff peaks.
1/2 cup heavy cream
In a separate bowl whip cream cheese with lemon juice.
1 cup cream cheese, 1/2 tsp lemon juice
Slowly fold whipped cream into cream cheese until combined.
Decorating cupcakes
To finally decorate the cupcake, draw around it drips of melting snow – use leftover icing for that.
Then add white frosting on top and smooth it with offset spatula or spoon. Leave some snow drifts, don't make it super even.
Insert a house and a Christmas tree in every cupcake, stick into frosting. Secure them with wooden toothpicks, cut in half. Add the roads and fences.
Video
Notes
*Don’t forget that you should fit one house AND one Christmas tree on the cupcake. So I suggest after cutting one house and one Christmas tree, lift them and try to fit on the cupcake mold to see if it fits. If it doesn’t, it is easy to cut more around the sides of the house and Christmas tree.