The little people in your life are going to fall in love with these floral Easter Bunny cupcakes and these Easter Chocolate Cupcakes just stylish enough to impress the larger people in your life too. Check out my blog for how to make these super cute chocolate bunny cupcakes for Easter, including a free printable template for creating these gorgeous chocolate Easter Bunny ears.
Easter is just around the corner. A fresh start, a new beginning, and a wonderful excuse for creating cute little cupcake creations, am I right?
The little people in your life are going to fall in love with these floral Easter Bunny cupcakes. And they’re just stylish enough to impress the larger people in your life too.
What makes these the best Chocolate Easter Cupcakes ever?
- Unique design: you’re friends and family will marvel out how cute these floral bunny cupcakes are.
- Moist Chocolate cupcake: these cupcakes not only look cute, they’re super delicious too. This is thanks to my moist chocolate cupcake recipe.
- Easy and quick: the chocolate Easter cupcakes may look detailed, but actually they’re not that hard to make at all.
How to make these Floral Easter Cupcakes
There are 3 key elements to these Easter cupcakes. Although they look impressive, the techniques used to make these cupcakes are surprisingly simple and easy to learn.
Step 1: Bake some chocolate cupcakes.
My easy chocolate cupcake recipe can be whipped up in 30 minutes, simply:
- Sift the dry ingredients and sugar together in a bowl.
- In a separate bowl use an electric mixer to combine wet ingredients.
- Then add the dry ingredients to the bowl of wet ingredients and mix it all together until everything is evenly incorporated.
- Bake.
Full details are in the recipe card below
Step 2: Make buttercream flowers
Easter = Spring and Spring = Flowers. You think these little buttercream flowers would be difficult to make, but actually the process is quite quick and easy. The secret is using Russian piping tips.
If you’ve never used them before, Russian piping tips can seem a little intimidating.
But in actual fact they’re easy to get the hang of, and once you do you can quickly pipe out dozens of floral cupcakes in just a few minutes.
The reason is these intricate piping tips allow you to pipe out cute little flowers in one quick squeeze. Genius! Am I right?
You can find Russian piping tips online at Amazon, Ebay or most cake decorating stores.
Top Tip: The key to making these flowers is to ensure your buttercream is the right consistency. Too soft and the buttercream will smoosh together. Too stiff and the flowers will tear as you lift away your piping bag. To get the right consistency of buttercream
- If your buttercream is too stiff, add a little more water. If it is too soft, add some more icing sugar.
- If you’re planning to have many different colors of flowers, do a test run prior to adding any food color, to see how well your buttercream pipes. This way you only need to adjust the consistency once (rather then needing to check the consistency of each batch of colored buttercream.
- Use gel food color. Using liquid food color may cause your buttercream to become soft (as it contains more water). In which case you’ll need to compensate by adding more icing sugar.
Step 3: Make Chocolate Easter Bunny Ears
The final touch to the Easter cupcakes is adding some cute little bunny ears made from candy melts.
To help you make these cute little bunny ears, I have put a printable template together for you. You can download my free bunny ear template by subscribing to my email list below
I hope you love making these floral Easter cupcakes as much as I did. These cute chocolate Easter Cupcakes will add a little pizzazz to your celebrations this year. If you do make them, I would love to hear how they went down, so please let me know in the comments below. You can also find me on instagram (@kylies_cakes_) an Pinterest (@theniftybaker).
Happy Easter and Happy Baking x
Related Recipes
Looking for more cupcake inspiration this Easter? Check out my Lemon & Ear Grey Ricotta Cupcakes.
Chocolate Easter Cupcakes
Equipment
- russian piping tips
- muffin tin
- Cupcake Liners
- piping bags
- electric mixer (either hand held or stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment)
- Easter Bunny Ear Template (see blog for printable template)
Ingredients
Chocolate Cupcakes
- 110 ml Milk (just under 1/2 a cup)
- 5 ml White Wine Vinegar (1 teaspoon)
- 110 grams All Purpose Flour (1 cup)
- 30 grams Cocoa Powder (1/3 cups)
- 1 teaspoons Baking Soda
- 1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder
- 1/2 teaspoon Salt
- 175 grams Caster Sugar (fine granulated sugar) (3/4 cups)
- 60 ml Vegetable Oil (1/4 cup)
- 1 whole Egg
- 1 teaspoons Vanilla Extract
- 120 ml Hot Instant Coffee (1 teaspoon of instant coffee dissolved in 1/2 a cup of boiling water)
Candy Melt Easter Bunny Ears
- 200 grams wilton candy melts
American Buttercream
- 200 grams softened unsalted butter (1 cup)
- 600 grams icing sugar (4 cups)
- 2 tablespoon milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
Instructions
Chocolate Easter Cupcakes
- Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (180 degrees Celsius) and line a 12 hole muffin tin with cupcake liners
- Combine milk and white wine vinegar in a jug and set aside to thicken.
- Next, sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, sugar & salt into a bowl and stir with a whisk to combine.
- In a second bowl, add oil, eggs, thickened milk & vanilla extract. Mix together using either a whisk, an electric handheld mixer or a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment.
- Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir together, then add the coffee and mix until all combined.
- Scoop the batter into your prepared cupcake liners and bake in the oven for 15-18 minutes or until cooked through (see notes).
- Once baked, allow the cupcakes to cool in the muffin tin for about 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
Candy Melt Bunny Ears
- Put your candy melts into bowl and melt as per directions on packet
- Pour the melted candy melts into a zip-lock bag, snip off the very tip.
- Place the printed template onto a baking tray and cover it with parchment paper. Use a dab of candy melts in each corner of both the template and the baking paper to hold both sheets in place.
- Use the template as a guide to pipe the candy melts onto the baking paper. Pipe an outline of each ear.
- When you've piped enough ears, place the whole baking tray in fridge until completely set.
Buttercream Flowers
- Place butter in a bowl and use an electric mixer to beat until light and fluffy.
- Sift icing mixture into the bowl of butter, then add the salt, vanilla extract.
- Now, mix everything together – first use a spoon to mix it all in, and then use your electric mixer to incorporate everything properly (using the spoon first will minimise the amount of icing sugar that fluffs up when you start using the electric mixer).
- At this strange the icing will look very dry, to bring it together add a milk, one teaspoon at a time, mixing well using the electric mixer after each addition, until the icing comes to the right consistency. You may need more or less milk then stated in this recipe depending on the temperature of your kitchen and your butter, so be careful to add milk gradually.
- If the mixture becomes too runny, you may have added too much milk. You can stiffen the frosting by adding more icing sugar. If you seem to be adding more and more sugar to the frosting, but its just not thickening up enough, its probably because your buttercream is too warm. Stop everything, and put the buttercream in the fridge for 10mins. Then take it out of the fridge and re-whip with your electric mixer.
- Once you have made your buttercream, prepare your piping bag, by placing a piping tip into the bag (narrow end facing towards the tip) and snip off the end of the piping bag. These are wide piping tips, so snip the bag so that only the very end of the piping tip is exposed at the bottom of the bag.
- It's now time to test the consistency of the buttercream. It's easiest to do this step before adding food colour, so you only need to test and adjust one batch of buttercream (instead having to check of 4 or 5 individual batches).To test the consistency, transfer some of the buttercream into the prepared piping bag. Hold the piping bag straight over a sheet of baking paper with the tip positioned about a centimeter above the paper. Squeeze the bag so the frosting comes out and attaches to the baking sheet, then release pressure and lift the piping bag away. You should (hopefully) be left with something that resembles a flower. If not, see the notes below for troubleshooting tips.
- Once the frosting is at the ideal consistency divide it into 3-5 bowls and use gel food coloring to tint to preferred color. For the green leaves I have colored the buttercream with Matcha powder.
- Transfer colored buttercream to piping bags. To achieve a multi colored look spread a thin layer of buttercream around the bag, then add a different color into the middle of the bag.
- To pipe onto cupcakes, hold the piping bag so the nozzle is about a quarter of an inch above the cupcake, squeeze the buttercream out, then release the pressure and lift the bag. Start by piping one flower in the center of the cupcake, then pipe a circle of flowers around the center flower.
- Fill in any gaps around the flowers using a green buttercream in a piping bag fitted with a leaf nozzle.
- Place chocolate bunny ears atop of the buttercream flowers.
Notes
- Baking Times: all ovens are different. To guarantee your cupcakes come out just as perfect as mine, I always recommend using baking temperatures and timings as a guide only. For best results rotate the muffin tins halfway through baking and test the cupcakes using a toothpick at the 15 minute mark. To test how cooked the cupcakes are insert a toothpick into the center of a cupcake. The cupcakes are cooked if the skewer appears clean when it is removed from the cupcake. Adjust the baking time accordingly based on how cooked the cupcakes appear at this point.
- Buttercream Flowers If the buttercream is too soft the flowers will pipe out as blobs. To address this either add more icing sugar, or place buttercream in the fridge to help to firm up. If the buttercream is too stiff, the petals will break or the buttercream will not stick properly to cupcake. To fix this problem add a little more water to the buttercream.
Have you have tried this recipe? Leave a rating and review and let me know in the comments below.
Better yet, take a photo and post it to instagram. Don’t forget to tag me and use the hashtag #theniftybaker