Dinosaur Circus: Avengers Party

My boyfriend Tetley is a big Marvel Comics fan, so in celebration of the new Avengers movie, we decided to host an Avengers movie viewing party. We watched all the films that lead up to The Avengers in the order they were released, and our friends could pop in and out depending on what movies they wanted to watch.

I decided to create some themed snacks for the occasion, and the obvious choice in this area seemed to be Captain America-themed cupcakes. I'm sharing the recipe here in case you want to have an Avengers movie night of your own, they would also be great for children's parties!

My recipe was adapted from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook's recipe for chocolate and hazelnut cupcakes, although I replaced the hazelnut topping with little Captain America shields.

The ingredients you'll need are

100g plain flour
140g caster sugar
40g butter at room temperature
1 egg
20g cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
120ml whole milk
1 packet of fondant
Red and blue food colouring.

The recipe, like most of my baking, is pretty simple, it's the decoration that's the tricky part! To make the cakes, simply beat together the flour, sugar, butter, baking powder and cocoa powder until they reach a sandy consistency. Then slowly add the milk and then the egg, beating constantly until everything is combined. Spoon into paper cases and bake for 20 minutes in an oven preheated to 170 degrees. The recipe makes 12 cakes, but I decided that we should probably have a few more to last us through 10 hours of movies (is it obvious we're students yet?) so I doubled the quantities.

Here are the cakes fresh out of the oven. I'm very proud with how even they turned out, normally I'm a bit more slapdash with putting the cake batter into the cases meaning that my cakes are rarely this uniform!

For the shields, I measured the width of the top of one of the cakes and used a compass to draw a circle template on card. I measured out smaller circles for the inner rings, as well as a star shape for the centre, and cut them all out. Then, I rolled out the fondant and cut around my circle and star stencils with a sharp knife. This would be a far quicker process with cookie cutters if you have any the right size, if not, investing in some may be wise as trying to cut out 24 tiny stars by hand requires a lot more patience than I possess!

For totally authentic Cap shields, you'll need to dye some of your fondant red for the first and third rings, keep some white for the second ring and the star, and dye a small amount blue for your central circle.

All 24 of the cakes were eaten, so I'm calling this recipe a success! They were sadly quite significantly more popular than Tetley's 'Hulk cookies,' that tasted ominously like soap and looked like this: