It can't hurt to give you a quick recap on the history of Cuddles and Dimples.
The two terrifying toddlers started out as separate stories -- Cuddles first appeared in Nutty in 1981, then upon that comic's closure in 1985 he transferred over to a new title, Hoot, and served as its cover star for its brief existence. Dimples had first appeared in the Dandy in 1984, and when Hoot merged into the Dandy in late 1986 the strips were themselves combined to form Cuddles and Dimples.
Initially, the boys were next-door neighbours, with the first combined strip featuring Cuddles and his parents moving in to Dandytown. However, Dandy editor Morris Heggie decided the characters would work better as brothers. Rather than suddenly retcon things, one set of parents (Cuddles') were slowly phased out over a period of several months; more and more focus was put on Dimples' parents, Cuddles' parents were moved into the background before disappearing altogether, and strips implying the two were now brothers started appearing. By October 1987, at least one strip that doesn't really make sense unless they're siblings had run.
However, because the various spin-offs of the main comic were produced on different schedules, stories where the two were still unequivocally neighbours continued to appear in offshoots such as Christmas books and the digest-sized Comic Libraries for a while after that. The last of these appears to be a Dandy Comic Library that was not published until 1989, but appears to have been drawn at a point where Cuddles still had his own separate strip! I've noted a couple of previous publications from 1988 that were drawn before the retcon but not released until afterwards... and I have one more to add to the list.
This strip ran in the Dandy Summer Special 1988:
(Stories having to alternate between colour and monochrome in the Summer Specials were fairly common before they went full-colour in the nineties.)
Although this strip was clearly drawn before the retcon, it's worth noting Cuddles says "you sound like mum!" in the final panel, rather than "you sound like my mum".
The Summer Special also features a page of Comic Cuts, a feature the Dandy had inherited from Hoot but was dropped from the weekly comic at some point in 1987:
(By the by: As I said in my earlier look at a full issue of Hoot, Comic Cuts featured a mixture of past and present characters from various different D. C. Thomson titles, but one thing I was not aware of was that there were two stories which appeared exclusively as Comic Cuts -- Tarzan Stripes, pictured above, and Flip and Flop, who fortunately appear in the issue of Hoot I scanned in. Tarzan Stripes is thus technically a fourth character who survived the Dandy-Hoot merger1 -- he also appeared in several Dandy Cartoon Books -- but I don't know if Flip and Flop were the fifth.
Ham and Egghead was a short-lived strip, usually drawn by Steve Bright, that was effectively a revival of Ken Reid's Big Head and Thick Head in all but name. It ran in the Dandy from 1984 to 1986, although I'd be wary of assuming its appearance here was done that far in advance.)
This is the first evidence I've ever seen that the Summer Specials had similar lead times to the Christmas annuals (which were usually completed a year before publication) or the Comic Libraries (which could be left on the shelf for years); there may very well be other interesting examples lurking around in other specials.
Just as a curio, here's the last strip from the Special, a spoof of The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross -- a series which began in January 1987, but the Special would have been released at some point during its third series (drawn by frequent ghost-artist Tom Williams):
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