Reading Activity

Snowmen cupcakes

Ingredients:

* 100 g. butter or soft margarine.
* 100 g. golden caster sugar.
* 2 eggs.
* 100 g. self raising flour.
* 1 tsp baking powder.
* 1 tsp vanilla essence.
* Icing sugar for dusting.
* 150 g. ready-to-roll white icing.
* 3 tbsp apricot jam.
* Marshmallows.
* Red fizzy lances for the scarves.
* Tubes of coloured writing icing.
* Sugar baubles (for cake decoration) and edible silver baubles.

Method:

1- Preheat the oven to 180ºC. Place the softened butter or margarine, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder and vanilla essence into the bowl of an electric mixter (you can do it by hand if you haven´t got the machine). Breat for a few minutes.

2- Line a bun tin with eight paper cases and divide the mixture between them, filling the cases to about two-third of the way up. Bake for about 20 minutes until the fairy cakes have risen and are lightly golden. Lift the cakes (stil in their paper cases) out of the tins and leave them to cool on a wire rack.

3- Dust a clean work surface with icing sugar and roll out the icing to about 5 mm. Cut out eight circles using a small pastry cutter that is the same size as the top of your cakes. Put the apricot jam into a small dish and stir in one tablespoon of hot water. Brush this over the surface of the cakes and stick the circles of icing on top.

4- To decorate the cakes, use marshmallows for the snowmen´s heads, black writing icing for the eyes, red writing icing for the smiles and sugar baubles for noses (stick them on with a blob of writing icing). Stick the heads on the cakes using a little apricot jam, then stick on the edible silver baubles for buttons. 

5- Wrap fizzy lances around the snowmen´s necks for scarves.

If you want to read more about Christmas cakes go to this link   http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/christmas

Now that you have learned this Cupcake recipe, it´s time to put it in practice! Answer these questions and make your own cake!