Maypole Cupcakes

I got the idea for these cupcakes when I was visiting Munich’s Viktualienmarkt and I saw this huge maypole. 

I had just come from the Wir Machen Cupcakes shop and must of had cupcakes on the brain syndrome.

• Cupcakes, any flavor. I used the vanilla cupcake recipe in the Hello Cupcake book.
• Buttercream, any flavor that is easy to color. I used Magnolia Bakery’s recipe for Vanilla Buttercream.
• Green Food Coloring. I used Wilton’s Leaf Green.
• Medium sized pretzel sticks.
• Blue and White store bought or homemade fondant. I made my own (recipe below.) I also made the flowers out of fondant by tinting it different colors with Wilton’s Red, Orange, Violet and Rose Pink food color gel. However, you can use any edible material to make flowers.
• Small flower cutters
• Edible yellow and orange sequins for the flower centers
• Edible gold dust
• 1 tablespoon clear drinking alcohol (I used Vodka)
• Small paintbrush
• A little water

• Make cupcakes and cool completely.
• If necessary trim the peak off the top of the cupcake to make it more level.
• Insert a pretzel stick into one of the cupcakes. Measure about 3 inches from the top of the cupcake upwards. Snap off the rest.

• Use the part of the pretzel you snapped off to measure the amount to snap off the other pretzels and trim them.
• Make an indentation in the pretzel  with your fingernail and pull the pretzel out of the cupcake.
• Roll out the blue and white fondant and cut into strips.
• Take one of each color, lay them side by side and starting at your fingernail indentation, roll the pretzel wrapping it all the way up to the top. Wet the fondant slightly to make it stick. Use this first one to measure how far to wrap the fondant strips, repeat with the rest.

• when all the pretzels are wrapped, roll fondant into little balls and stick them on the tops of the pretzel sticks. Insert them into the cupcakes. I had some leftover brown colored fondant I used for this
• To gild the fondant pole toppers, dip the paintbrush in alcohol and wet the ball. Then dip the brush into the gold dust and paint the ball gold.

• Make the buttercream and tint it green. I did a smooth coat first on the cupcakes, then went back over each with a piping bag fitted with a grass tip. The tip kept clogging so I kept rinsing it. As a result, my grass ended up a bit soggy.
• Take one strip blue fondant. Anchor one side to the top of the pole using a bit of water.  Twist the strip a few times and anchor it at the bottom to the edge of the cupcake. Repeat one either side of the cupcake with a white strip.

• Roll out the fondant colors you want to use for flowers and cut out the shapes. 

• Use a bit of water to adhere the sugar sequins in the middle and place them on the grass. Mine are a bit out of proportion. I tried using smaller sugar ones but these larger ones looked better.