Last year, my nephew and godson, Cyril, was born on Thanksgiving Day. To celebrate his first birthday, I made some turkey cupcakes as he was having a Thanksgiving themed birthday party. Here's what they looked like:
Unfortunately, due to bad weather, they actually never made it to the birthday party. Now I have a bunch of turkey cupcakes lying around with no home. I hope that someday, however, he will at least appreciates the sentiment. I'll be sure to show him pictures so he can.
I got the idea from
Hello, Cupcake, which is a great resource for cupcakes for all occasions. As usual, however, I changed some of the ingredients because some of the items used by the book's author are pretty hard to come by. So I usually make do with what can be found either in the cake decorating aisle of
Michael's or the local grocery store. Here is what I used:
- 24 regular and 24 mini Pumpkin cupcakes baked in white liners (see recipe below).
- 2 cans vanilla frosting - set some aside for eyes in a small ziploc bag. To dye the rest the correct color, use brown, yellow and orange food coloring until you have a caramel color.
- Gold pearlized sugar - roll the entire edge of the large cupcakes and the top edge of the minis for a feathery effect. (Hello, Cupcake calls for caramel jimmies which would also work well if you can find them.)
- Candy corn for beaks and tail feathers.
- Pizzelle cookies - these Italian cookies are quite thin and I found them in the bakery section of Fred Meyer. Any cookie with a scalloped edge would work, but a thin kind would be best. To make it work better, I broke out 1/3 of the cookie so that it was contoured to fit the top of the cupcake. Pipe 7 stripes of white frosting onto the cookie and add the candy corn for feathers.
- To support the the cookie/tail feathers I cheated and poked a toothpick into the cupcake to lean the cookie on. I know it isn't edible, but truthfully, no one is just going to be biting into these anyway. So just warn your consumers that there is a toothpick in there and they will be able to easily remove it.
- Red fruit leather cut into elongated tear drop shape for wattle.
- White frosting (that you saved from earlier) and mini chocolate chips for eyes.
I had used a Pumpkin Spice Cupcake Recipe before that did not work, so here is what I did and it worked!
Pumpkin Cupcake Recipe:
2 boxes yellow cake mix
2 tsp Pumpkin Pie Spice
3/4 cup canned pumpkin
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
2/3 cups oil
7 eggs
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Put liners in cupcake tins. Combine all ingredients except eggs and blend well. Add the eggs one at a time, blending well after each addition. Pour into prepared liners until 2/3 full and bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean and the tops are a nice and firm.
Makes 24 regular and 24 mini cupcakes.
