High Altitude Christmas Tree Cupcakes

These elegant Christmas tree cupcakes are impressively tall, made with buttercream piped onto an upside down ice cream cone hidden inside. Decorate them with sprinkles and star anise for the perfect holiday touch.

You might also love these high altitude recipes for a Christmas tree layer cake, chocolate peppermint cupcakes, and chocolate gingerbread cake.

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Ingredients

• Cupcakes. You can choose any flavor, but I made my recipe for chocolate cupcakes, which makes 15 cupcakes.
• Buttercream. You’ll need quite a lot of buttercream to cover the ice cream cones. My recipe for American buttercream has the perfect pipeable texture for this project.
• Gel Food Coloring. For a strong color, use gel food coloring. I used various shades of forest green, leaf green, electric green, turquoise, and super black.
• Sugar Cones (Ice Cream Cones).
• Assorted Christmas Sprinkles.
• Star Anise. For decorating only, don’t try to eat these.

See the recipe card at the end of the post for the full ingredients list and instructions.

Instructions

Cupcakes

• Bake one batch of chocolate cupcakes, or any flavor you choose.
• Let the cupcakes cool completely.

Buttercream

• Prepare 5x the recipe for American buttercream.
• To make a deep green color, I used gel food coloring in “forest green”, “leaf green”, “electric green”, “turquoise”, and “super black”. Add a few drops of each, then keep adding more until you achieve the color you want. Note that the color will deepen and darken a bit as it sits.

Decorating

• Place a sugar cone upside down on top of a cooled cupcake (please see my notes below for tips on the best results when using the sugar cones).
• Fit a disposable 16 inch piping bag with tip 1M, and fill half full with the green buttercream.
• Starting at the base of the cone, pipe a row of drop flowers around the edge to secure the cone to the cupcake. Continue piping all over the cone until you reach the top.

• For a different look, you can also use piping tip 352, which is a leaf tip. See this Christmas cake for an example.

• Before the buttercream crusts over, decorate with sprinkles to look like Christmas lights and ornaments.
• Finish by decorating the cupcakes with a light dusting of powdered sugar.
• Instead of using cones, you can also just pipe a simple swirl of buttercream onto the cupcakes and decorate it with sprinkles.  In this case, you’ll only need to make half the amount of buttercream.

Be sure to read all of my BAKING FAQs where I discuss ingredients, substitutions and common questions with cake making, so that you can be successful in your own baking! I also suggest reading these comprehensive posts on making Perfect American Buttercream, How to Stack, Fill, Crumb Coat and Frost Layer Cakes and How to Use Piping Bags.

Frequently Asked Questions

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