How cute are these?! You are probably thinking I made them for a little girl’s birthday party, but these were actually a coworker request. Colleague birthdays provide the perfect opportunity for me to have fun baking, try new recipes and share sweet treats with others. Nearly all the time, they choose a favorite cake/frosting flavor but this time my coworker mentioned that she is a huge fan of Hello Kitty and asked if I could incorporate that into a cupcake. Sure, why not?! She did request a chocolate cupcake as the base, so I started brainstorming and went to work.
I used my favorite chocolate cupcake (just the cake portion of the chocolate whiskey cupcakes). These are my favorite based on flavor and texture, but incidentally they were especially perfect for this purpose because they bake up with flat tops. I used pink-tinted vanilla buttercream to frost the cupcakes. Then I used homemade fondant to make the kitty shapes. Since I couldn’t find a good Hello Kitty cookie cutter anywhere (and it probably wouldn’t have been the right size anyway), I just found a picture via Google, sketched it out on a piece of card stock, and traced around it with a very sharp knife to make the fondant shapes. You could, of course, just print an image and use that as a template, but we don’t have a (functioning) printer at home. Finally, I used black and pink royal icing to do the detailing of the eyes, noses, whiskers and bows. These would be so much fun to make for any little kid who loves Hello Kitty, and would also be a great project to work on together!
