Having four days off in a row means that you can get up to mischief. Eating your body weight in chocolate eggs and hot cross buns is  one way to pass the time. Seeing friends and family is another. The only thing that presents itself as a problem to me during this blissful four day Easter break is shopping. The stores are usually closed on Good Friday and Easter Sunday so that means that even though I have two pantries full to bursting, I feel an almost warlike need to stock up on food. It’s the mere idea that I might run out of food that causes a chill.

I stockpiled rations on the Thursday and the Saturday night shopping late so that we would survive the Cruel Winter …I mean two days. I know it’s silly and doesn’t make sense but I did have Mr NQN’s brother The Assman coming over and a picnic (weather permitting) to go to so I needed the rations. After all you can’t feed guests just anything or bring something completely unfabulous to a picnic. I already had a good stash of chocolate already mainly bolstered by Mr NQN winning a gigantic Easter bunny at work as well as lots of eggs so I felt safe and comforted sitting upon my pile of goodies (and I’m sure you can picture me sitting on top of a mountain of food).

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Each year, you know its approaching Easter once the Valentines Day products disappear and the Easter eggs and chicks come out. For some reason I have a bizarre liking for these tiny little yellow chicks. I even made a miniature nappy with safety pins for one. A year ago, we had put them in our mini cactus garden but I accidentally watered one and once you get water on these little chicks, they are ruined. I knew my Easter cupcakes had to include these chicks, in memorandum of the one I accidentally killed with water. RIP little chickadee. And don’t worry, these ones will live the life of a free range chick in our cactus garden afterwards.

Making a cupcake of the chocolate variety would surely be the obvious choice for Easter So I used a double chocolate raspberry cake. The main problem was that my royal icing was not as stiff as it needed to be. Perhaps I need to use meringue powder or something like that to get my icing rock hard.

Now for the technical bits and picking the original recipe apart (from a book I shall not name). Their recipe says to pipe directly onto the cake but when I did, this odd white bloom formed between the cake and the icing the next day after I left it to dry overnight. So luckily I had piped the basket weave onto the cupcake paper for some of them and that seemed fine-although eating the icing off the paper doesn’t make for good eating. Also I wasn’t able to pipe onto the cupcake all at once, I had to do it in two batches – one half and then the other half, as my royal icing was not that firm so I didn’t want them to sit upright as the effects of gravity on setting icing are obvious. So put plenty of time aside for this-2 days to be certain that the icing dries.

I’d also recommend using the a straight edge cupcake paper pan as you will want to pipe upwards and it makes it easier. Of course its up to you but I did use one of the brown paper ones that you can get at stores. It did mean that since they are larger, I got half the amount of cupcakes though so be sure to adjust for numbers. There’s nothing worse than a kid missing out on a cupcake-or an adult for that matter.

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