The One With Christmas Eve Dessert

Last year for Christmas Eve, my sister and I made super cute snowman cupcakes. They turned out great, but took forever to make. This year we wanted something a little simpler. We looked through all of the holiday ideas in one of our favorite cupcake books, What's New, Cupcake?, and decided that the Hannukah star cupcakes would be the easiest. This was a slight problem, because we don't actually celebrate Hannukah, so we adapted the recipe a little to be Christmas star cupcakes. It turns out they weren't as simple as we thought, but here's how they turned out...

Step 1: Bake some cupcakes (we made funfetti holiday cupcakes from a mix). These can be made ahead of time so you don't have to do everything all in one day.
Step 2: Gather your supplies: Jolly Ranchers, White Frosting, Christmas Cookie Cutters, Cooking Spray,
Foil, Cookie Sheets
Step 2 1/2: Preheat the oven to 350.
Step 3: Sort out the Jolly Ranchers into colors. Pick the colors you want to use, and unwrap them. Save the rest for bribing the 1st graders when school starts again (oh wait, that's just me).

Step 4: Put the candies into a big ziplock bag. Using a rolling pin or something else heavy, crush the candies into little pieces. They are hard to crush since they are such thick candies, but just keep hitting them. We found that slow and steady was best. Here are some "action" shots of crushing the candies. (Notice my super cute flower headband/wrapping from my present. Visit my sister's blog at someone's gotta pay to see more of her fair trade wrapping ideas!)

Step 5: Once your candies are crushed, put them in a little pile in the middle of a cookie sheet covered in foil. We used a pie tin, which also worked out pretty well.

Setp 6: Bake the candies for about 3 minutes or until they are all melted together and smooth. While the candies are melting, choose the cookie cutters you want to use (we used 2 different size stars, an ornament, and a snowflake) and spray them with a little cooking spray. As soon as the candies come out of the oven, press the cookie cutters down into the melted goo. Leave them there until the candy hardens again. You might want to put it in the fridge to speed up the process.

Step 7: Once the candy is hard, carefully break the candy around the cookie cutters, then peel the shapes off the foil. I broke the tips off quite a few stars, so be careful! Then put them on some wax paper until you are ready to decorate all of the cupcakes.

Step 8: Repeat the candy melting process with all of your colors. We found out that it would have been really helpful to have more than just 4 cookie cutters so we could do bigger batches. We did a lot of waiting in between colors because we had to let the candy get hard with the cookie cutters still stuck in.

Step 9: When all of your shapes are made, start frosting the cupcakes. Then stick the stars and snowflakes in however you want. I especially like the ones with 2 shapes. Make sure the broken tips point down!

Step 10: Enjoy spending time with your friends and family this Christmas, and enjoy eating your dessert!