Christmas Tree Cupcakes for Kids

I have a friend who has a huge family.  Years ago when the nieces and nephews were young they started a tradition that every year on Christmas Eve they build gingerbread houses from graham crackers.  It’s a competition with no real winner.  I have always loved that idea.  I love the fact that the kids who were 5 when they started the tradition are 25 and help the little kids.  I have always wanted to do something like with my family, so when we got the idea to make these Christmas Tree Cupcakes I thought that decorating the trees would be a fun thing for the kids to do on Christmas Eve night.  I would imagine there will be a lot of eating of frosting and M&M’s, but in the end I think everyone will enjoy it.

How to Make Christmas Tree Cupcakes for Kids

You will need:

• Cake Mix
• Snow Cone cups
• Christmas Sprinkles to make Funfetti cupcakes (optional)
• Cupcake pan
• Rice or Beans
• Aluminum Foil
• The Best Buttercream Frosting
• Green Food Coloring
• M&M Candy
• Christmas Sprinkles (for decorating the cupcakes)

We saw the idea to make the Christmas Tree Cupcakes on the Better Homes and Gardens website, you use snow cone cups instead of traditional cupcake liners.  Super Genius idea! We found these Jelly Belly Snow Cone cups on Amazon.

Next, you’ll need to get the cupcake pan ready to bake the Christmas Tree Cupcakes.  We filled the cupcake pan with beans, brown rice and white rice to see if one worked any better than the other. It did not – they all worked fine. Go ahead and use beans or rice, whatever you have handy.

Cover the cupcake pan with foil.

Create a small hole in the foil over the rice or beans.

Stick the snow cone cup tips into the rice.  They should now be fairly stable and ready to bake.  We used 2 snow cone cups to add an extra bit to sturdiness.  We filled the snow cone cups a little more than half way with our Christmas Funfetti Cupcake Batter.

Bake the cupcakes according to the directions on the cake mix you used. We baked ours in a 350 degree oven for 22 minutes.

The snow cone cup easily came off our baked and cooled Christmas Tree cupcake.

The Christmas Tree Cupcakes turned out great.  We think the second snow cone cup really helped make sure the cupcake edges didn’t get too brown.

To get ready to frost the Christmas Tree Cupcakes, we made up a batch of our Best Buttercream Frosting and colored it green.

First we piped on some of the Best Buttercream Frosting and then used a spreading knife to cover the cupcake tree with frosting.

To smooth out the frosting, we let it sit for 15 minutes. Then we took a paper towel and used it to smooth out the frosting on the Christmas Tree Cupcake.

Finally, it was time to decorate the Christmas Tree Cupcakes.  You can use piped frosting, sprinkles, M&M’s – you are only limited by your imagination.  But please learn from our mistake, we should have trimmed the bottoms of the Christmas Tree Cupcakes before we started decorating them so that they would sit evenly and straight.  As you can see, we have some leaning Christmas Trees here!  But oh well, they were all very yummy, even the crooked ones.

This was a fun project.  And we think it’s going to be a great new family Christmas Eve tradition.  Next year, Laurie says she is going to make her Christmas Tree Cupcake into a Santa Hat Cupcake!  So check back for that next year.  Merry Christmas everyone!

And don’t forget to visit our Christmas Dessert Ideas post to see all of our other fun and festive Christmas Treats!

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