winter snowflake hello kitty birthday cupcakes

For my daughter's 6th birthday a few months ago, we went with a winter/snowflake theme, since her birthday is in December, plus she's still really into Frozen right now! We had a small gathering to celebrate, to which she invited a handful of her best friends, and I ended up making her a Tokidoki Yuki Unicorno winter birthday cake, as well as snowflake cookies for the favors. So to stick with the theme, for her Kindergarten class celebration at school, I decided to make Hello Kitty snowflake cupcakes!

I started with a moist chocolate cupcake (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book), and topped it with a cream cheese frosting (recipe also in my book!), which I tinted blue and then used a basketweave tip to pipe my basketweave design (there is also a basketweave tutorial also in my book, but you can also find other basketweave examples throughout the blog).

Then I used white frosting to pipe Hello Kitty on top of each cupcake, along with black eyes and whiskers, a yellow nose, and for each bow I used two heart-shaped confetti sprinkles. (For more examples, see links here, here, here, and here. And this link for the first and original cupcakes that I made!)

And for the final touch I added a few snowflake sprinkles! (I got mine at Target, but you can also find them here).

The cupcakes turned out moist, minty and chocolately, and not too sweet!

One of the kids even thought it was the sprinkles that tasted minty :)

Miss Melodie loved her cupcakes, and I loved watching her eat them with her classmates!

Enjoy!

snowflake cookies

To go along with the winter Tokidoki unicorn cake that I made for my daughter's 6th birthday in my last post, I also made these snowflake cookies as the favors. She's still really into Frozen right now, so she is currently loving anything with snowflakes! Fitting, for a winter birthday!

I started with my favorite sugar cookie dough (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), which I rolled out to about 1/8-inch thick, and then used a snowflake-shaped cookie cutter to cut out my shapes. Then I baked them at 350F for 10-12 minutes until golden brown.

For the royal icing (recipe also in my book!), I only needed two colors - white, and light blue! So I outlined each cookie with stiff white icing (using a disposable pastry bag fitted with a small round tip), and then filled them in with runny white icing.

After the cookies had dried for several hours (I prefer overnight), I used stiff light blue icing (tinted with Americolor sky blue) to pipe a snowflake design on each cookie (also using a small round tip). I did a pretty common snowflake design, but you can do whatever design you like!

They came out pretty nice! And they were a good size to give out as cookie favors.

I ended up wrapping each one in a cellophane bag tied with raffia, which keeps them nice and fresh for 1-2 weeks.

I think these would also be great as cupcake toppers, or even as decorations for a "Frozen" themed cake! They would even look great on place settings at a Christmas table, similar to how I used cookies on place settings in this post!

Enjoy!

winter yuki tokidoki unicorn birthday cake

For my daughter's 6th birthday this past December, I asked her what kind of cake she wanted. She told me that she wanted another unicorn cake, like the Tokidoki one that I made for her last year, except she wanted to pick a different unicorn this time. So we looked up Tokidoki unicorns, and as soon as she saw Yuki, a winter unicorn with snowflakes, she was smitten! (She's still really into Frozen, and she loved Yuki's snowflakes!)

Since we were going with the winter theme (winter bithday, winter unicorn), I decided she should have a minty chocolatey cake! So I made two 8-inch chocolate cakes (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), filled with peppermint whipped cream. (I sliced each cake layer in half horizontally, giving me four cake layers and three layers of filling).

After filling and chilling the cake, I whipped up a batch of cream cheese buttercream (recipe also in my book!), and covered the top and sides of the cake with it. Then using a piping bag fitted with a medium star tip, I piped long vertical swirls of frosting along the sides of the cake (the same technique that I used here, here, and here, inspired by a Nikole Herriott cake).

Then I was ready to pipe the unicorn. I used a toothpick to draw my outline, and then used a small round piping tip with black icing to trace over the outline.

Then I used a small star tip to fill in my unicorn! (For the snowflakes, I used a smaller round tip to pipe them over the piped stars).

To finish decorating the cake, I piped a birthday message in blue, and then I was done!

Stay tuned to see the winter cookie favors that I made, and cupcakes for her class party as well!

Happy Birthday, my sweet Melodie! We love you so much!!!