I might be making a habit of this.

Last Christmas, I somehow got it into my head that it would be fun to make cupcakes with miniature fondant gingerbread houses on top. And don’t get me wrong; it was fun, and the cupcakes landed me on Martha Stewart Living’s instagram account, which has over 700,000 followers to my 125. The cupcakes also kept me inside my apartment for an entire weekend while making them, temporarily upped my cursing tendencies by at least threefold, and earned me multiple epithets of “insane” and “crazy” from my coworkers.

So, naturally, I had to do it all again this year.

I never have just one baking project going on around the holidays (it’s the most wonderful time of year, after all, and I have to do something with those visions of sugar plums in my head), so when I was home with my family before Christmas (and before the annual Bûche de Noël madness began) I whipped up some ornament-shaped sugar cookies decorated with royal icing to give to family and friends.

When December hit this year, I started thinking about what I could bake for my Martha Stewart Living coworkers that would go above and beyond the gingerbread house cupcakes of 2014. My mind wandered back to the pretty (but oh-so two dimensional) ornament cookies of the year before, and I decided that I would try and create cupcakes with three-dimensional Christmas ball ornaments on top: we were moving from the merely circular to the fully spherical.

It’s one of the most cliché (but also most true) statements in life that the journey is often as important as the destination; I’ve found that this holds true in the realm of baking, as sometimes the most fun and challenging part of a project is figuring out how to get to the final envisioned product – and have that final envisioned product be completely edible, to boot. More often than I’d like to admit I find myself at the subway station after work with little memory of the walk from the office, so distracted was I with working through the mechanics of a baking project in my head (this is not recommended if you live and work in a large city like New York).

So my first step was to figure out how exactly I was going to make the cupcake toppers. Ball ornaments come in different sizes, so I wanted to make decorations that would fit both standard and mini cupcakes; I also knew I wanted each ornament cupcake topper to be a hollow hemisphere of fondant, which I eventually achieved by purchasing Styrofoam balls in two different sizes and molding the fondant over them to keep its form. Chocolate gummies found at a candy shop would form the ornament caps, while rainbow sour belts cut into thin strips would create the loops.

After letting the fondant harden on the Styrofoam balls overnight, I removed the hemispheres from their supports and painted each with a mixture of whipped cream vodka, food coloring, and edible pearl dust – a “watercolor” similar to the one I recently used on my cake stand cupcakes – that dried to a realistic shine. While the base color dried on the fondant, I painted each chocolate gummy with a mixture of edible silver pearl dust and vanilla vodka for a metallic look, cutting them down to size where necessary for the smaller ornament toppers. I then used craft tweezers to insert each end of a small strip of rainbow sour belt into two holes I poked in the top of each silver gummy. After painting the sour belt loops silver, I whipped up a batch of royal icing and attached each completed ornament cap and loop to a fondant hemisphere, then went to bed secure in the knowledge that the basic decorations were done and all that was left for Sunday were the embellishments on the larger ornaments.

But overnight, the Sugar Plum Fairy failed me.

When I woke up the next morning, the rainbow sour belts that had seemed so stable as ornament loops the night before had broken in half, making the ornaments look like they now had little antennae. This is where another cliché life statement comes into play; if at first you don’t succeed, you try again. I considered trying to fuse the broken ornament loops together with frosting, but – unsurprisingly – royal icing is not as reliable as real-life soldering. Instead, I gave up on repairs and sought out an alternate material. I hate the stuff myself, but after searching through my local candy store, licorice seemed to be the best substance for the job – it came naturally curved in a wheel, and was thick enough that it wouldn’t break, unlike the original sour belts. I returned to my apartment, made the necessary repairs to each ornament cap, and prepared to move on from my momentary setback.

While the smaller ornaments would remain solid-colored without additional decorations, I spent the rest of Sunday embellishing the larger ornaments with royal icing designs. It was 9:00 PM by the time I finally finished the decorations, baked the cupcakes, made the frosting, and put everything together: by that point my fingers were nearly as colorful as the ornaments, my body had a festive coating of sugar and pearl dust, and I’d spent nearly every waking moment of two days working on one batch of cupcakes.

All in all, a pretty good weekend.

The next morning, I headed to the office with the cupcakes in tow, where they were greeted with even more adjectives like “crazy” and “insane” than last year (I counted!). Like the gingerbread house cupcakes, the ornament cupcakes also made it onto the Martha Stewart Living instagram account, where they garnered over 8,000 likes, blowing last year’s numbers out of the water. (Many thanks to my friends and family for their support on instagram, especially our family friend who staunchly defended my baking honor when one user suggested that the cupcakes looked nice, but probably didn’t taste that great.)

But the best part was yet to come: after taking a mini cupcake for herself, my manager suggested that I show them to Martha’s assistants before too many were eaten. I headed over to the executive offices, where Martha’s assistants requested that I leave the cupcakes with them for Martha herself to see when she returned that afternoon. I of course agreed enthusiastically (you don’t say “bah, humbug” to the opportunity to show off your cupcakes to Martha Stewart) and agreed to keep an eye on my phone so I could come pick the cupcakes up once Martha had seen them.

I returned to my desk to try and get some work done. A few minutes later my manager returned from the bathroom, joking about how she didn’t realize until she was in front of a mirror that the cupcake she had eaten – the same cupcakes I had just left with the office of Martha Stewart – had turned her mouth completely green. Turns out that the vodka hadn’t diluted the food coloring painted on the fondant ornaments quite as much as I thought, and each cupcake was now a ticking color bomb waiting to go off inside the mouth of anyone who ate one. Anyone, including the founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, my ultimate boss and a woman whose schedule is a rotation of television appearances, photoshoots, and exclusive events. All things with cameras very much in evidence, and all things to which it would be a bad idea to show up with bright blue teeth.

So I spent the rest of the afternoon with my emotions swinging wildly between pride at what I’d accomplished and dread at the prospect of receiving a call from HR requesting I pack my things for dyeing Martha’s teeth as brightly as, well, Christmas ornaments.

At four o’clock, my phone rang: it was Martha’s assistant, telling me that Martha was in her office with my cupcakes and had requested that I come talk to her about them. Now, here’s the thing: in over a year of working at MSLO, I hadn’t yet met Martha face-to-face. Seen her from a distance, sure – made eye contact with her once or twice, even, but now I was being called into her office to speak with her for the first time about cupcakes.

I headed back to the executive suite, where Martha’s assistant waved me into her office. Martha was in a meeting with a group of people, and was standing over my cupcakes taking a picture with her phone. It’s all a bit fuzzy after that, but as best I can remember Martha asked me if these were my cupcakes (yes), how I’d made them (Styrofoam balls, etc. etc.), and if my buttercream tasted good (also yes). While we were talking, I dimly realized with a sense of relief that her teeth weren’t lit up like a Christmas tree – she hadn’t eaten a cupcake, after all.

I was politely dismissed after a couple of minutes (with the cupcakes safely in hand) so that Martha and her colleagues could get on with their meeting, and I walked back to my desk feeling like a little kid on Christmas morning.

Next on my agenda was spreading that cheer to my friends and coworkers, and by the end of the day the plate of cupcakes looked like Cindy Lou Who’s living room after the Grinch’s visit: all that was left was one lone ornament cap.

…and plenty of MSLO employees with temporarily technicolor teeth.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Recipes

Chocolate Cupcakes: This the same chocolate cupcake recipe from The Kitchen Workshop in Paoli, PA that I’ve featured before – since it’s not available online, I’ve included a writeup of the recipe below. It’s the perfect recipe for a baking project with a lot of added sugary elements (like, say, cupcakes covered with a fondant dome filled with buttercream) since the cake itself isn’t too sweet.

Vanilla Buttercream: This buttercream is, as usual, my tried-and-true recipe from Real Simple that I’ve featured on the blog many times before; I felt confident telling Martha Stewart that it tastes great, so you know it must be good!