War Horse Cupcakes

Cinnamon Cupcake recipe

Glue 2 cookies together

Cut corner off cookie and candy peanut

Click on any photo to enlarge.

Add curved pretzel "tails"

Horses eat potato stick straw!

A complete cavalry of war horses!

My book club met on Monday night, and our book for last month was WAR HORSE, a slender children's novel published about ten years ago.  The book has been turned into a spectacular play that debuted in London's West End and is playing now at Lincoln Center.  I saw it last month, and can't say enough good about it.  The only thing bad I can say about it is that the theater should provide a box of tissues with every seat.  :-/

Anyway, I wanted to commemorate our book with my usual cupcakes, so I stumbled across a picture of horse cupcakes and decided to try to emulate them . . . in my own way.

Since the horse in WAR HORSE is a red horse, I could have gone with red velvet cake, but there's also a black horse in the story, and that's the easier choice:  chocolate.  So I made a chocolate cinnamon cupcake--the cinnamon is my tribute to the red horse--and frosted the batch.

Then I took those rectangular sugar wafers and "glued" two of them together with icing.  They come in many colors, so I tried to stick with my chocolate theme.   Finally, a candy peanut made the horse's head.  I wanted to find chocolate or vanilla candy peanuts, but my grocery only had orange.  So, let's just call that another tribute to Joey, the red horse, and move on.  :-)

After letting those "set" in the fridge for a few minutes, I sliced off the corners of the cookies and the peanuts so the two pieces would fit together.  I "glued" them together with melted chocolate and put them in the fridge to set. Then I cut an opening in each frosted cupcake and pushed the cookie into the opening, then proceeded to messily pipe "hair" for the fretlock and mane.  The cupcake icing wasn't stiff enough to stand up properly, so I got some decorator's frosting, which worked much better.  Went a little color crazy, but so did God when he made horses.  ;-)

A broken piece of pretzel covered with icing and dipped in jimmies made the tail, and I piped on a few white spots and put some jimmies on them, too.  Finally, the little horses gathered around a pile of potato sticks "hay" for their supper.

I don't know that they're very professional looking, but I had fun.

Enjoy!

P.S.  I wish I could take credit for the idea, but credit belongs to HELLO, CUPCAKE!, a book in which I saw the cupcakes pictured.  I used those basic directions, and improvised a bit.  But someone else is the cupcake design genius.  :-)

~~Angie