Holiday Cupcakes: Thanksgiving

Well, we did it again! Terra and I searched far and wide for Thanksgiving cupcake ideas and finally settled on these three because they were just too freakin’ hilarious to pass up! And definitely not the typical cupcakes one would expect to come across. Surprisingly enough they were incredibly easy to make and didn’t require nearly as many ingredients as our Halloween cupcakes. I’m even thinking these may be a new holiday baking tradition!

We spread out the baking and decorating over two evenings again so we could take our time with it and not stress about getting them all done. Between the Halloween cupcakes and these ones, we have now used three different brands of mix and both agree, hands down, that Betty Crocker makes the best. Probably because it’s the only mix that requires water, oil, AND 3 eggs! Our motivation wasn’t quite as plentiful this time around so we decided to stick with 2 boxes rather than 3, which made a little over 30 vanilla cupcakes, all topped with vanilla frosting.

For the “turkey leg”, we covered the frosting with toasted coconut and made little bones using almond bark and a bone-shaped cookie cutter. The almond bark was so much easier to work with than we expected and will more than likely be used again for various things on future holiday cupcakes. The “peas and carrots” were made with green Skittles and diced up orange Starbursts. Next time we’ll know to get more candies. We ran out of the colors we needed pretty quickly and had to resort to adding some yellow Skittles as “corn”.  As for the “mashed potatoes”, my personal favorite, we just drizzled caramel sauce on top of the frosting for the gravy and added a yellow Starburst as the butter. They ended up looking so realistic that several people thought we actually topped our cupcakes with real mashed potatoes and gravy! Nope, definitely nothing but pure sugar with these treats!

Random Fact About Me #826: I hate eating with my hands. I can't always avoid it but it's messy and makes me eat too fast so I can be done sooner.