soirees & sweaters & sweets, oh deer!

I love dressing up, and I love Christmas so it is only natural that I love tacky sweater parties. Lucky for me, I have a couple already planned this season. The first of which is tomorrow afternoon at work. Over the top sweaters. An awkward family photo booth with props. Oh, and did I mention that everyone has to bring their favorite holiday treat?!? I. Can't. Wait.

By now everyone at work is pretty familiar with my baking obsession. I dare say I've set the bar pretty high with some of my past creations for our various treat days so the pressure was really on for me to find something fantastic to make for tomorrow. 

Pumpkin cupcakes for my manager's birthday. Oreo football truffles for a co-worker's
birthday. Watermelon cake balls for our summer barbecue. Oreo cupcakes for Boss's Day.

I'd been perusing Pinterest trying to keep my eye out for cute holiday themed treats, but I just couldn't get over the adorable reindeer cupcakes that I made for a cookie exchange last year. Never one to rest on my laurels, I decided to change them up a bit for the party tomorrow. I didn't have an abundance of time on my hands this evening so I used a boxed chocolate cake mix and store-bought chocolate frosting. Oh the horror! However, if you are feeling like Little Miss Martha Stewart and want to try making these cupcakes from scratch here is my favorite chocolate cake recipe of all time. So good! Seriously people will be knocking down your door for this recipe!

Ready to rock!

After the cupcakes had cooled I started by applying a thin layer of chocolate frosting.

The frosting doesn't have to be perfect since a majority of the cupcake will be covered by a vanilla wafer.

Next add a vanilla wafer and the reindeer's eyes. Last year when I made these cupcakes I used white m&ms as eyes and then added a dot of black frosting for the pupil. This was a little tricky to say the least. Luckily this October when I was killing some time in the seasonal section of Target (my fave!) I came across an amazing invention. Seriously life altering people.

Don't fret! It seems these babies are sold year-round. I saw them at Wal-mart earlier
tonight, and I imagine you can also find them at Hobby Lobby or Michael's as well.

I seriously think these candy eyeballs take the difficulty level of these
cupcakes from a 5-7 down to a 3. Ahhh-mazing!

Now it was time to give the little guy a nose and some ears. I used both brown and red m&ms for the nose (obviously you need some Rudolph's thrown into the mix duh) and Milk Duds for the ears. To get the nose to stick, add a dab of frosting to the side of the m&m with the 'm' on it and press lightly to the vanilla wafer. The Milk Duds were a wee bit trickier. When I started to decorate the first cupcake I just stuck the Milk Duds into the frosting as is, but my reindeer totally looked more like a bear than a deer. FAIL.

Definitely not seeing a deer here. 

Since this approach was clearly not going to work, I decided to try squishing the Milk Duds a little bit at the top to make them more pointed. I definitely think the next cupcake turned out more deer-like. Just make sure you don't mold the Milk Duds for too long, or they will start to melt. 

These might be a little too pointy, but certainly an improvement over the bear!

By far the hardest part of these cupcakes was getting the pretzels to break in appropriate "antler-like" fashion. I wasted a lot of pretzels tonight, but I can assure you my dogs are going to bed with full bellies! ;) 

Yikes!

I guess the beauty in making antlers is they are all different so there really isn't a right way to make them.

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3, 4, 5....you get the point.

If you don't want to go to war with the pretzels then I would suggest using the smaller sized pretzels like I used last year. 

Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

I think these cupcakes turn out adorable either way! Hopefully they are a hit at the party tomorrow!