Valentine Cupcakes & Cookie Banner

Sweet & crafty treat for you & your family to celebrate Valentine's Day!

What you need~

3 or more Cupcakes
Conversation Candy Hearts for your cake plate
Crushed Candy Hearts to top the cupcakes ( place them in a bag and use the bag of a spoon to crush)
2 straws ~ in the pictures these are paper straws from Fort and Field
Baker's twine ~ I order mine from The Twinery 
Skewer o make holes in the cookies before baking
3 heart sugar cookies

First bake your favorite cupcakes, let them cool & top with your favorite icing flavor.  I used chocolate to pair with my cinnamon buttercream ( the recipe for the buttercream is below).  Set them aside.

For the cookie banner~
You can do 1 of 2 things, make your favorite cutout cookie recipe or buy the ready to bake sugar cookies from your store.  Roll out the dough, and cut-out 3 small hearts.  Place them on the cookie sheet that you have lines with parchment paper.  Take the skewer or something similar to make small holes to lace the twine in the cookie cutouts like shown in the picture.

 When finished making the holes before baking the cookies, put the sheet & the cookies into the freezer for 5 minutes.  This will help your cookies hold there shape while baking.

When your cookies are baked and cooled you are ready to assemble the banner.  Line your cookies up and on both ends tie a piece of twine so you can tie the cookie banner to the straws.  Next take another piece of twine and lace the other cookies, start in the back so you will end in the back like shown in the picture.

After assembling the cookies tie each end securely to the straws.

Top your cupcakes with the crushed candy heart topping that you have prepared and line them on the plate.  Insert the straws into the cupcakes, you may have to move around just a bit to make it go across evenly. Place the candy hearts around on the plate.

Peace, Love & Cupcakes & Cookie Banners~

Enjoy!

Stacy ~ Scrumptious Swirls  Join & follow along for many recipes & craft ideas!

Cinnamon Buttercream Recipe~

1 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon (more if you would like)

2 sticks of unsalted butter

1 tablespoon of vegetable shortening ( if you want to sub the shortening add ¼ stick of butter)

Cream butter and shortening or just the butter very well

Add 1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract & a pinch of salt (I use Kosher)

Mix together

Adding the Sugar:

Total of 4 cups or 1 pound

Some recipes call for you to sift the sugar, I don’t find that necessary. What I do is~ pour the sugar into a mixing bowl 1^st to loosen it up. 

Add the sugar to the butter 1 cup at a time on Medium Speed

After you are done it should be crumbly a bit and big chucks of sugar and butter~

Next the cream~

Add 2-3 tablespoons to start.  Again this is where buttercream becomes personal to me with the texture of it.  Mix again on medium until you get the desire of flavor and texture you want.  Only add 1 tablespoon additional at time to reach it. 

{TIP: if you add to much cream, just add more powder sugar.  But again a little at a time}