Homemade holiday cupcake ornaments can be given as delicious gifts or used as a festive holiday centerpiece.

Make the holidays even sweeter this year by baking cupcakes that are as special as the people you bake them for. These beautiful Ornament Cupcakes make great gifts. Or you can use them as a centerpiece or even festive place cards at your next holiday dinner.
Achieving the look of real ornaments requires that you carefully select not only your ingredients and decorations, but also your baking cups. Reflective red, green and silver foil have just the right amount of sparkle and shine.

Ornament Cupcakes

• Reynolds Baking Cups
• White and colored fondant, rolled about ¼-inch thick
• Red sugar crystals
• Dragées
• Silver metallic luster dust

Prepare cupcakes in Reynolds Foil Baking Cups. Place 2½-inch white fondant circles on cupcakes.
Use cookie cutters to cut decorations from colored fondant. Brush tops with water to add sugar crystal sparkles and dragée details. Brush bottoms with water to affix to cupcake.
Make hooks with white fondant. For each cupcake, you’ll need one 1-inch circle and thin strings 1 inch long and 2 inches long.
Form base of hook by shaping fondant circle around fingertip. Bend 1-inch string into loop. Bend 2-inch string into hook. Paint each piece with luster dust as package directs.
Brush loop with water and affix to base. Brush bottoms of hooks with water to affix to cupcakes. Finish by gently threading hooks through loops.

Looking for something different or to celebrate Hanukkah or New Year’s? Make Smiling Snowmen, Twinkling Trees, Candle Cupcakes or Black Tie Cupcakes.
At cupcakecentral.com you’ll find complete instructions for these and over 7,000 custom cupcake combinations that you can create using the new Reynolds Baking Cups Create-A-Cupcake tool. -(NAPS)