The first thing to make is the mini chocolates in the mini molds mentioned above. After melting the almond bark in a disposable piping bag, I cut the tip off to make a small hole.
Fill each mold, piping the melted almond bark into the cavities. Be careful to not overfill.
Gently tap to even out the almond bark in the mold. Place in freezer for 5 minutes.
Carefully pop chocolate out of the molds after removing them from the freezer. I dusted each chocolate with luster dust to highlight the details on each chocolate. Below you can see the difference. The top snowflake is dusted and the bottom one was directly out of the mold.
Push chocolate back into bag away from the opening if you have the molds filled. This allows you to re-melt the chocolate in the microwave without it leaking out the cut end. The chocolate molded minis can be made way ahead of time.
As I went to bake my mini cupcakes, I noticed that my liners were too open.
Somewhere online, I remembered reading about someone "re-crimping" their cupcake liners. I picked out a round cutter from my Ateco round cutter set that was the size of the muffin cavities and the next size smaller.
Place a stack of liners in the larger cutter and place the smaller cutter on top. I used the palm of my hand to push the liners down into the larger cutter. Allow to set for an hour or two.
Here is the same method used on regular sized cupcake liners.
Here shows the mini liner on the left and the resized mini liner on the right. It fits just fine down into the cavity. That helps prevent the outside of the liner kinking when the batter is put into the liner.
Set out the mini cupcakes into the shape of a Christmas tree. I found that my large heart shaped cardboard worked fine for the shape
I reheated the remainder of the chocolate in the piping bag and "glued" the individual cupcakes to the foil board with a small bit of melted chocolate to prevent the cupcakes from moving.
I piped a swirl of green buttercream on each cupcake and placed one of the minis on each one. Looking at the picture you can see where I just piped a wide zigzag for the bottom part of the tree. To show off the star that I piped on the top cupcake, I first placed a white fondant disk on the cupcake first. The center of the green piped star was a green star.
With some of the extra minis from this project, I molded some red minis. I piped a large green buttercream star on the cupcake before adding the chocolate mini. I didn't care for the pearl dust on the red minis so I did not dust the red ones. Experiment and you'll know what you like the looks of.
I love Ritz crackers with peanut butter dipped in white almond bark. I dipped some for our family Christmas treats. This time I just used the mini hearts to accent the tops.
Albums of my decorated cakes can be seen at: http://flickr.com/photos/sewsweet2/sets
DTC Products Used:
Christmas- Mini #1
Christmas- Mini #2
Christmas- Reindeer Mini
Christmas- Angels Mini
Valentine- Heart set of 6
Button- Large Set of 9
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