Pumpkin Cupcakes

While Jenny over at The Inner Bean has been working on her great Halloween Tombstone Project, I've been thinking about food. Halloween presents a great opportunity to "play" with food, and one of the easiest ways to do this is with cupcakes. Halloween cupcakes can range from simple desserts--topping a cupcake with candy corn, for example, to elaborately constructed monsters. Pumpkin cupcakes are a quick and easy variation-- you can put them together in about the same amount of time it takes to frost a plain cupcake.

What you need:

*Cupcakes of your choice, cooled and ready to be frosted
*Container of vanilla frosting
*Orange food coloring
*Orange decorating sugar
*Pretzel rods, broken into short pieces about 1" long

Step 1: Scrape the container of frosting into a mixing bowl.

Step 2: Add several drops of food coloring, and combine with an electric mixer until blended. Repeat if the color isn't dark enough, continuing until you're happy with the hue.

Step 3: Mound frosting on the cupcake, smoothing the top as much as possible.

Step 4: Roll each cupcake in decorating sugar.

Step 5: Use a bamboo skewer to draw segments radiating out from a bit off center of the cupcake. (A toothpick will make too thin a line).

Step 6: Insert a piece of pretzel rod where the segments meet.

If you feel like branching out into more elaborate productions, decorated cupcakes are fairly simple to reverse engineer. Here are some great photos that might inspire you!