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.
All recipes on Curly Girl Kitchen are developed for high altitude at 5,280 feet. See FAQs for adjusting to higher or lower elevations.
Equipment
- Cupcake Pan + 15 Paper Liners
- Stand Mixer with Paddle Attachment
- 16-inch Disposable Piping Bag (plus tip 1M)
Ingredients
- 1 recipe Chocolate Cupcakes (or any flavor you like)
- 5x recipe American Buttercream
- gel food coloring forest green, leaf green, electric green, turquoise and super black
- 15 sugar cones (see notes)
- assorted Christmas sprinkles
- star anise
- powdered sugar
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.
Notes
Using sugar cones/ice cream cones under the buttercream makes these cupcakes impressively tall, but it does use a lot of buttercream. The cupcakes may also be a little top-heavy with all the buttercream, so I suggest inserting a plastic straw into the cupcake to assist in keeping the cones in place.
I carefully broke off about 1 1/2 inches of the cones to make them slightly shorter. Even with some of their length removed, they were still quite tall, as you can see.
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.
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