Snake Cupcakes

Happy Chinese New Year! This year is the year of the Snake. So as a dessert for a Chinese New Year celebration, I decided to decorate some cupcakes and place them in the shape of a snake. This idea is quite simple, but it looks pretty cool. There aren't too many other foods, especially desserts, that can be made into the shape of a snake, besides cakes and cookies. The most difficult part here was to find something big enough to display and transport the cupcakes on, but my father came up with the idea of using a plastic under-the-bed storage container. Actually, I have used this before for transporting baked goods. It is large and flat, so you can avid stacking things, it is on wheels, has a snap-on cover, and is easily cleaned. Perfect. he only downside is those strange blue bumps you see, which are the wheels.

For the cupcakes, I baked a batch of twenty-four chocolate cupcakes and let them cool. Then I whipped up a batch of buttercream icing. I tinted the buttercream two different shades of green, just one slightly darker than the other. Technically the black snake is this year's snake, but I don't have black food coloring, and I don't like to eat black icing, it doesn't look all that appealing in my opinion. Then I used the open star icing tip attachment from my cookie press to pipe swirls onto the cupcakes. I loaded one vertical half of the tube with one shade of green and the other with the other shade, so that when the swirls came out, the two different tints of green would swirl together. This is prevalent in several of the cupcakes, but some the two colors ran together and sort of morphed into one. This was fine with me, because a snake would not have an even green skin tone anyway. This is the first time I have tried this swirl technique. It would have been easier to fill using a piping bag, but I wanted big swirls, and I do not have a large enough star tip to fit my piping bag, so I used the cookies press instead, which required frequent refills, as the tube is small. It does make piping easy though. Once I had all of the swirls piped, I arranged the cupcakes in a snake shape in the container. Then I piped round eyes with white buttercream onto the two front cupcakes, and added two chocolate chips for pupils. I was a bit disappointed that I did not have any food that would have worked to make a tongue. I didn't have any red fruit roll strips or anything, so I had to resort to inedible construction paper attached to a toothpick.

I had one extra cupcake left over. Not because it would not have fit in the snake shape, as it probably would have, but I had made just enough green frosting to frost twenty-three cupcakes (and barely at that). This is actually an improvement for me, as usually I make far too much icing. So with the extra cupcake, I wrote "Happy New Year, 2012, The Snake" to set next to the snake. Happy New Year!