Christmas Cupcakes

For Christmas season, Elena and I decided to make some Christmas cupcakes from a recipe in a cupcake magazine. We started out just making the vanilla bottoms, and luckily we didn't have to change the recipe at all for high altitude. They were perfect except for a small dip in the middle. While they cooled, we ate dinner and then Elena's friend came over, so I made the frosting alone. I stood there for forever frosting the cupcakes–I had only made a third of a recipe, so I didn't know why there was so much. Elena and her friend came in when I was still frosting, so I told them to start the fondant, and that they needed three cups of marshmallows. They looked and looked for about five minutes, and couldn't find any except a bag of long marshmallows in the pantry with gummies in the middle. We didn't want gummies, so they kept looking. I gave them suggestions on where to look while I frosted the cupcakes, and they still couldn't find them. Finally I finished with the frosting and was able to join them in looking. Of course, the second cupboard (which they looked in–or had at least opened) held a bag with about seven normal marshmallows in them. So they started with those while I looked some more. In another cupboard (which they had looked in) I found a bag of long, skinny, colorful marshmallows on the top shelf. Buried a bit behind those was another bag of a few normal marshmallows for them to use. In a few minutes I had found two bags of normal marshmallows and one bag of colorful marshmallows, and all they had found was a bag of colorful marshmallows with gummies in them. Even with the three bags I had found, we didn't have enough and had to get the gummy marshmallows out. We didn't want gummies in our fondant, so Elena started dissecting the marshmallows and pulling long strings of gummy out. We then thought of what we could do with the gummies: since the cupcakes were supposed to look like Christmas ornaments, we could use them as the hooks; so we set them aside and proceeded to follow the rest of the directions. Eventually we got to the part that told us to dump the melted marshmallow mixture onto the counter with lots of powdered sugar and knead it until it was smooth. All that we managed to do was get our hands really sticky. So we washed our hands and Elena and her friend went off while I waited for Mom to get home. When I got Mom up there, I told her what we were supposed to do, and what was supposed to happen. Somehow Mom managed to barely get any extra stickiness on her hands, and kneaded it out very nicely. We colored half of it red and the rest of it green. While Mom rolled it out, I cut out circles and covered the cupcakes and we both made little circles to go decorate with. Near the end, to get the extra powdered sugar off, we wet some paper towel and rubbed the fondant. All went well, except the fondant wouldn't really stick to other fondant, and I discovered that's why there was extra icing–to stick the fondant together with. I tried a piece of the fondant and it was really sweet and good. When we were finished, we all ate one, and they were probably the best tasting cupcakes I've ever had (but some of them looked kind of funny–we ate those first). We learned with those cupcakes to 1. save a little frosting for the fondant, 2. cut the circles bigger to cover the edges of the cupcakes, and 3. leave some of the fondant white to have more color.