Apples for School!

With it being the last day of school I wanted something special to bring to Benjamin’s class party.  What could be more special than three dozen apples for the teacher!

I used my triple chocolate cake recipe and made 36 cupcakes.  While they were cooling, I whipped up a batch of buttercream frosting.  I separated out about a cup of the frosting to use for later while  I used Wilton’s red food coloring gel to get a deep pink color for the rest.  I would have needed the entire container of gel to get it to the shade of red that I wanted but I knew that I was going to be covering the frosting in red sugar crystals so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Using my one-inch circular decorating tip, I pipped jumbo sized dots, one on each cupcake.  While the icing was still “wet” I went ahead and rolled the tops in a bowl full of red sugar crystals.  Be sure not to push them too hard on any one side or it will squish and you won’t get that nice rounded look.

Once they were all sprinkled I stuck one pretzel stick in the top center of each “apple”.  That was to be the stem.  Once each apple had a stem they needed a leaf or two.  Using the cup of buttercream that I had separated out at the beginning I tinted that green using a bit of the Wilton blue and yellow gels.  Using the leaf tip, I pipped a leaf onto the top of each of the apples.

I’m really excited about the way these turned out!  And in all honesty, they didn’t take much more than an hour and a half from start to finish.  That includes cooking and cooling times.  Oh yeah, and an episode of Modern Family!

(Sorry about the pictuers.  My camera battery died and we were on our way out the door for school so I had to use my phone.)