Preheat your oven to 180C/160C Fan, and get your cupcake cases ready on a tray.
Beat together your butter and sugar, and beat until light and fluffy.
Add in the flour, cocoa powder and eggs and beat until smooth.
Split evenly between your 12 cupcake cases, and bake in the oven between 17-20 minutes.
Once baked, leave to cool fully.
For the Buttercream
Make sure your butter is at room temperature and beat it on its own for a couple of minutes to loosen it up.
Add in the icing sugar and vanilla and beat again until combined.
Take out about 100g worth of buttercream, and move to a separate bowl. Add in the cocoa powder, and beat into the 100g of buttercream.
With the rest of the buttercream, beat in some good quality green food colouring until you reach your desired green.
For the Decoration.
Line your cupcakes up onto whatever plate/tray you want to serve them on. I do one, two, three, and then four cupcakes for the tree part, with two at the bottom for the trunk.
Slather/pipe on some of the green buttercream over the tree cupcakes. I usually use an angled spatula to get it on or pipe it on.
Slater/pipe the chocolate buttercream on the trunk part.
Melt your white chocolate and add some food colouring for tinsel/lights and drizzle on in lines
Decorate with sprinkles or anything you fancy to make it represent a Christmas tree!
You can make smaller cupcakes to have a bigger tree, but be careful about transportation as once you connect them with the buttercream they're hard to move without ruining it!
You can make the cupcakes vanilla by using 150g of self-raising flour, and no cocoa powder.
These cupcakes will last for 3 days at room temperature!