Go Back
Agnes Hsu

Santa Pull-Apart Cupcakes

Create a festive Santa cake design by arranging cupcakes into the shape of Santa’s face and decorating them with buttercream frosting. Use red frosting for the hat, swirls of white for the beard and trim,  and frosting accents to bring Santa to life—perfect for a fun and easy holiday treat!
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Ingredients Method Video

Ingredients
  

  • 24 cupcakes (baked and cooled, using your favorite cake mix)
  • Beige or light tan icing (you can mix your own using yellow and brown gel colors with a dot of red for warmth)Red icingWhite icingBlack icingPiping bagsSmall and large star piping tips
  • Red, white and black icing
  • Piping bags
  • Small and large star piping tips

Method
 

  1. Step 1: Bake and Cool Your Cupcakes Start by baking your favorite cake mix into 24 cupcakes according to the package instructions. Once baked, allow them to cool completely before decorating.
  2. Step 2: Arrange Your Cupcakes Once the cupcakes have cooled, arrange them in sort of a diamond shape without the pointy sides. This will form the shape of Santa’s face. (See image for example).
  3. Step 3: Frost Your Cupcakes For the center cupcakes, use beige or tan icing to create the skin tone of Santa’s face. We used an offset spatula to smooth the icing for this.
    Pipe a small red circle towards the bottom center of the beige icing for Santa's mouth using red icing.
    Using white icing and a small star tip, pipe around the bottom half of the cupcake arrangement to form Santa’s fluffy beard.
    Use a small star piping tip with red icing to pipe the top half of Santa’s face to form his iconic red hat.
  4. Step 4: Add Santa’s Hat Details Switch to a large star piping tip with white icing to pipe a fluffy rim along the bottom edge of the red hat.
    Then, pipe a small rosette at the tip of the hat to make a pom-pom!
  5. Step 5: Create Santa’s Facial Features Pipe a small round nose just above the mustache using beige/tan icing.
    Pipe two eyes using black icing. Add a touch of white icing with the small star tip to pipe Santa’s eyebrows.

Video

Tried this recipe?

Let us know how it was!