Pink peppermint cupcakes.

So I mentioned that I made fruitcake for a family holiday gathering. At the last minute I decided to take another dessert along just in case there were some who really really just did not care for fruitcake (which would have been fine…it’s not everyone’s bag). I decided to do a chocolate cupcake with pink peppermint buttercream icing dipped in white chocolate.

Dipping the frosting is, okay, a little gimmicky. It’s gorgeous and striking but it makes your cupcake a little more difficult to eat. You really can’t beat it for making an impression, though, and as it turns out it’s actually pretty easy. But more on that in a minute.

The best thing about these cupcakes is that I already had everything I needed to make them fancy-ish. Two drops of peppermint flavoring and two drops of red food coloring were all I needed for the pink peppermint frosting; I bought a huge bag of white candy melts sometime around Thanksgiving in anticipation of making some type of bark (which never came to fruition); and I picked up a container of pink sugar roses on a jaunt to Superquinn in Ireland.

So I baked some chocolate cupcakes. Next, I piped on some frosting with a big round tip. You don’t really need any kind of precision here because you’re going to be flattening the frosting.

I used a butter knife to re-shape the frosting swirls. You do this so the dipped chocolate will have a nice smooth appearance.

And then I melted the white chocolate candy melts in the microwave and dipped the cupcakes.

The first time I dipped cupcakes (for Almond Joy cupcakes) I was positive the frosting would slide off. Nope! It was really easy. It took a couple tries to get it to look really nice when I did the Almond Joy version, but these went swimmingly and the pure white candy melts were awesome.