 Hi I'm Janice Hall with the Alabama Extension and today I'm going to be showing you how to decorate holiday cupcakes that you can do at home yourself just using a few tools that you may already have at home. We're gonna have a lot of fun but first we need to cover some basics food safety basics. The first thing you need to remember is that you need to wash your hands before you start to decorate. We want to make sure that this is done so we don't make anyone sick. Another thing to do is to make sure that you are wearing gloves. I'm going to demonstrate this when we get started with our cupcakes. Not only can you bake those delicious and beautiful cupcakes for home for the holidays but you can also sell those through a program that the Alabama Extension offers called the Cottage Food Law. If you're interested in starting an at-home business just visit our website at www.aces.edu.com or slash go or slash cottage food business. Now let's get started and have some fun decorating our cupcake. Okay so now we're going to make a present cupcake and we're going to use our red fondant to make our first present cupcake. So before we start with our red fondant we're going to cut out a circle to go on top of that cupcake. Okay so we have some white fondant. I want the white to be our base but you can use whatever color you would like. So we're gonna take it and roll it out and then using a cutter any circle cutter that you may have at home will work. It just depends on what you have and as long as it's a circle and you can cut with it you go for it. Alright so we have cut out our circle. Now to get our fondant to stick to the cupcake we're going to take a little bit of icing and we're going to just smooth it on top of that cupcake. Isn't that looking pretty already and we hadn't even gotten to the present part of it. Then we're going to take our circle and we're going to place it on top of the cupcake like this. Okay it's starting to look amazing already. Okay now I like sprinkles so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put sprinkles on the cupcake before we start with our present. So just take a little bit of water and smooth it on top of that cupcake. Now you do not want a lot of water on your cupcake because that will make the colors on your fondant start to bleed. So you want to make sure it's just a little bit of water and then we're gonna take our sprinkles and we're gonna just put sprinkles. Oh I love sprinkles on cupcakes don't you? Yes. Okay and we're gonna add those little pieces that fell off. Now that looks pretty by itself but let's take it up a notch. Alright so now we have our red fondant so you're gonna take your fondant and roll it out like that. Doesn't have to be long you just need it long enough so that you can cut out some rectangles. That's right rectangles. So we're gonna take our piece of cutter or whatever you may have at home that you can cut with safely and we're just going to even it up a little bit on each end and now I'm going to cut a ribbon a rectangle. So here we go you just cut it and you've got one rectangle and then you go and you cut another one about the same size. So we got two rectangles which are our ribbons and we already have water on our fondant so to get it to stick we're just going to place it on top of the fondant. Now it's starting to overlap. Uh-oh so what do we do? We just gonna we're gonna take our finger and pop it off. Then we're gonna take our other piece of fondant and we're going to put it try to get it as centered as you can and then we're going to use our finger and pop it off. There we go. Check it out. So we've got our ribbon on our cupcake. Okay so now to get our bow every present should have a bow of some sort. Ribbon is really cute but I love a bow on a present. So now to make a bow you probably have seen these in the craft stores. These are fondant molds and you can make shapes all of these different shapes by just using fondant. So basically it's super easy y'all you just take your fondant and I'm gonna use this bow it is so cute and we're gonna just press it in the mold like that and we're not done. You don't stop here you actually need to make sure all of that fondant is inside of that that particular decoration that you want to make. So what I do is I'll take my finger or my thumb and just press down pretty pretty hard try to give it a nice little and break off that excess fondant like that. Now what you need to do and if you could just see right here I'm going to make sure that all of the fondant is inside of the design. Remember in school your teacher taught you color inside the line color inside the line. Well that applies right here we're making fondant. All right so now what we're gonna do I like to try to get that out I would I like to bend it and just pop it out like that. It's not gonna break I promise you. All right so then what you're gonna do you've got your pretty bow you're gonna get you just a little bit of water just a tad to go on top of that cupcake. And now we have our present cupcake. Okay so if you don't have a mold to make your fondant bow I'm gonna show you right quick how to make one using your fondant and not not the mold. So basically just take your fondant and work it a little bit roll it into a ball then rock it back and forth. Get you a nice little tube going. Then we're gonna take our rolling pin and roll it out so again we're going back to those ribbons. So we're gonna roll it out and we're gonna cut make sure it's somewhat on the thin side but not too thin. Then you're gonna just kind of even it up a little bit just like we did with our present and I'm going to just even it up and you want to cut a rectangle. I would say about one two three inches so we're gonna just cut it off right there. And then you're gonna take that ribbon and fold it find the middle way of that fondant and squeeze it together like that. So you kind of made a circle a ring and then you're gonna take it and squeeze the middle to make a bow like that. And then take your pinky and wiggle inside to open that bow up. Now for the wrap in the middle you can just take a piece of the fondant that you cut a little bit thinner than what your ribbon was and just wrap it get a little bit of water to help it to stick and you're just gonna wrap it around the middle. Break it off with your finger and you've got a fondant bow like that that you can put on top of your cupcake.