Polar Bear Cupcakes – Kid Friendly Baking

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For a fun winter baking activity with kids, try these polar bear cupcakes! Use any light colored cupcake recipe you like and any white colored buttercream. With just some sprinkles and some fondant, you’ll get a dozen kawaii cupcakes! They’re easy enough even my toddler could help me decorate. If you’re looking to incorporate your kids more in the kitchen, my friend Shannon has a neat guide at her blog Our Hawaii Test Kitchen.

How to Make Polar Bear Cupcakes

First step: the cupcakes. I used the coconut cupcake and vanilla buttercream recipes from the Sprinkles cupcake cookbook. You can’t go wrong with Sprinkles! Of course, you can use any recipe you’d like.

Next step: the polar bear “fur.” Pipe a blob of frosting on top of the cupcake and then dunk the whole thing into a bowl of white sprinkles, smushing the frosting down the sides of the cupcake. I used white sanding sugar, but you could use other small white sprinkles or chopped up shredded coconut! By the way, I’ve really been liking these biodegradable piping bags I got from Amazon.

Use Fondant to Decorate the Cupcakes

For the ears, eyes, and nose, I used a small (less than 4 oz) chunk of fondant. If you’ve never used fondant before, don’t be scared. It’s essentially edible play doh. You can get all white fondant and dye parts of it black and pink, or you can buy the fondant pre-dyed. To roll and cut out the shapes, I used a fondant rolling pin, Wilton round piping tip #12, and a Wilton 1M piping tip. The big end of the 1M piping tip makes the ears (cut them in half) and snout; the small tip of the #12 makes the eyes and nose.

The little pink dots for the cheeks were made by taking tiny pieces of fondant about the size of a grain of rice and flattening it with my fingers. That’s it! You can use a regular rolling pin and any circular cutters as well, or just free hand it. The If the fondant gets sticky, a little dusting of cornstarch or powdered sugar should do the trick.

I’ve also got a Reel of Jemma and myself decorating these cupcakes on my Instagram! (P.S. These matching aprons are linked in my gift guide for cooks post.)

How easy was that? If you make these, be sure to tag me on Instagram!

By the way, if you love baking with kids but want more savory food ideas for kids, especially veggies, my friend Christina at Lazy Momming has some good tips here. Between the two of us, we’ve got your whole kids meal covered!