Where can I find the original treat?
- This holiday time treat can be found at the Jolly Holiday Bakery Cafe at the Disneyland resort.
I’m having a pretty hard time this year trying to narrow down what to eat treat-wise every week at the park; the offerings this year are just so good! One of my stops is always the Jolly Holiday Bakery Cafe because the baked goods there almost never disappoint. Case in point, the Holiday Cupcake. Which is what we’re making this week!
With such a nondescript name, the “Holiday Cupcake” could be anything, and what it is, is a moist vanilla bean cupcake with a tight crumb, lightly sweetened two-tone frosting, delicate red and white sugar pearl decorations, edible silver stars, a peppermint-inspired white chocolate candy, and a surprise filling of red and green M&M’s candies. What a mouthful! What could easily be a treat too sweet to finish, is actually pretty balanced in that department and I think it has to do with the lightly sweetened frosting. Landing somewhere between an Italian buttecream and Ermine frosting, it’s light like whipped cream, but stable, and very lightly sweetened.
So, for this recipe I’m going with Ermine frosting, a boiled milk style frosting, which might not be a familiar name to some people, but it’s actually been around for some time. Ermine has a whipped cream like texture when made fresh, and was the original type of frosting for red velvet cakes before the ubiquitous cream cheese frosting took over. I love to use it on cakes as a filling and outer layer, and then decorate with American buttercream for decorations as I get the sharper edges I am looking for when I want stars and lines. I hope you try the combination, people I’ve served it to love the contrast in frostings!
The vanilla cupcake base utilizes vanilla bean paste so you get to see all the tiny vanilla bean seeds throughout the cake. It’s moist but holds up to cutting as you’ll need a bit of a tighter crumb for hollowing out the center to fill with candy.
And the decorations, well, here you can go as big and bold as you want. Or tone it down too. The sugar pearls and the edible stars can easily be purchased from Amazon or your local craft store like Michael’s. The peppermint inspired white chocolates can be made at home (I know these are definitely looking homemade!), but you could also sub in an actual peppermint here too, and I think that would look pretty.
Kids can help in a few ways here. My 2-1/2 year old helped me mix the cupcakes, fill them, and decorate. But I’d say maybe 5 and up could handle piping out the frosting too.
Decorating cupcakes in such a festive way has really gotten me into the holiday spirit this year. And I hope they bring a little magic into your home and kitchen too!
