Peacock Cupcakes

Knead the Emerald Green icing on a clean, dry surface until smooth and pliable. Lightly dust the surface with icing sugar and roll your icing out, rotating after each roll to prevent sticking. As we've used Ready to Roll Icing for these feathers, we've rolled the icing to 3/4 cm thick to hold it's shape, but if you choose to use Flower and Modelling Paste then you can roll this thinner.

If you don't have a feather shaped cutter, you can use an oval or large circle, then cut and shape into feathers by hand. Use a modelling tool to lightly mark in a feathered effect at the wider end of the shape. Leave these to firm up before adding more colours of icing.

Knead the Atlantic Blue icing on a clean, dry surface until smooth and pliable. Lightly dust the work surface with icing sugar and roll out the icing to about 3mm thick, rotating after each roll to prevent sticking.

Cut out smaller feather shapes as you did with the green icing, and attach these to the green part of the feather using a little cooled boiled water. You can trim any edges away with a sharp knife and add a feather effect to the wider edge again with a modelling tool.

Knead the Deep Purple icing on a clean, dry work surface until smooth and pliable. Lightly dust the work surface with icing sugar and roll the icing out quite thinly, rotating after each roll to prevent sticking.

Use a very small heart shaped cutter to cut out a shape for each feather. Leave these to one side for now.

Paint a thin coat of Metallic Dark Gold paint in a circle onto the blue part of the feather. You can add more coats to build up the colour. Once this is dry, add a thin edge to the circle with Metallic Holly Green paint.

Using a cocktail stick or paintbrush, add gold highlights to the feathered edge of the icing by sweeping the paint from the middle outwards.

Use water or edible glue to attach the purple heart to the centre of the gold circle, placing this upside down. You could also attach the heart while the paint is still wet.