Seasons > Autumn > Home Decorations > 8 Ways to Decorate  Cupcakes for Thanksgiving

A centerpiece of cupcakes will delight kids and adults alike. Dress them up by displaying your handy work on a pedestal  cake stand or a cupcake stand. There are inexpensive cardboard cupcake stands at Walmart and sometimes dollar stores.

If you decide to go all out and decorate a lot of different kinds of cupcakes, do yourself a favor and make half of them with one of the easy toppings--the cupcakes will still wow your audience, but it won’t be as much work as if you did all of them different.

The easiest way to decorate cupcakes is to use a decoration that is already made. Both of these cupcakes have marshmallow pumpkins, but the one on the left is the consistency of candy corn, and the one on the right is marshmallow consistency, and has jam in the middle. The one on the right is actually supposed to be a sour peach, but I thought it looked enough like a pumpkin to use for a cupcake decoration. It tastes pretty good, too, so you might need to buy two bags incase you keep tasting them as you decorate the cupcakes (true confessions!) Just plop the pumpkins onto iced cupcakes, and they are ready to go.

To make a Mayflower, poke a toothpick into a small round candy, such as a Rolo or mini Reese’s Peanut butter Cup (these have ridges, of course.) Poke two mini marshmallow onto the toothpick. Use a knife heated over a burner to slice off the backs of the marshmallow sails. To make the waves, mix blue food coloring into white icing, but don’t mix it all the way. I used the back of a spoon to scoop up the white and blue icing and made 3 waves.

The turkey cupcakes are a little more work, so if you don’t want to go to that much trouble, you can give all the ingredients to the guests, and let each person make his or her own turkey. You will still want to make at least one turkey as a sample, or several samples if there are lots of guests. (If some of them decide to eat the ingredients as is, that’s o.k., too.) If you do make a lot of turkey cupcakes yourself, you will need to make the tail, body, and head and store separately, and then put them together on the day you serve them. Otherwise, if you put them all together and wrap them in plastic, the moisture from the cupcake makes the cookies soft and flop over, and the heads becomes a wet sticky mess. (more true confessions!)

To make the head, knead 2 caramels together and shape into a neck and head. Press mini chocolate chips into the sides of the head for eyes. For the beak, cut the yellow end off one Candy Corn and press into a beak shape, then press into the face. Cut one Redhot in half and press into the face to represent the waddle. For the tail, “glue” several Candy Corn to a cookie with icing. Leave flat until the icing has hardened. Store the tails, bodies and heads separately. Before serving, fasten the tails to the bodies with icing and fasten the heads on with 2 toothpicks each. Warn guests that there are toothpicks in the cupcakes!!

To make Indian corn, knead chewy yellow candy such as Star Bursts. Form it into an oval ear of corn, and roll in sprinkles (Jimmies, Hundreds and Thousands) to make it look like Indian corn.  Form the husks from a caramel or green chewy candy--knead till soft, then form into an oval. Cut one end into quarters with kitchen shears or a knife, but don’t cut all the way to the end. Squeeze each quarter into a husk leaf, and put the yellow corn cob inside the husks. Don’t worry if some one or two of the husks fall off--just press back on. Put the Indian corn on the cupcakes at the last minute because if you cover the cupcakes with plastic wrap after the corn cobs are on them, the moisture from the cupcakes tends to turn the caramel into a gooey mess.

To make 2 Indian teepees knead 4 caramels together, roll into a ball, then flatten into a thin pancake. Cut the caramel pancake in half and form into 2 cones to form 2 teepees. Be sure to fold back the flaps to form a door. Decorate the teepee with bits of Tootsie Roll, and add “poles” coming out of the top of the teepee with more bits of Tootsie Rolls. To make the camp fire, cut off bits of Tootsie rolls to form the logs. Make yellow flames out of yellow chewy candy, or a bit of Candy Corn and press between the Tootsie Roll “logs.” If you make a lot of these at once, put them on sheets of wax paper. If you put them on a plate, they quickly stick, and tend to pull out of shape when you try to pull them off. Put these on the cupcakes at the last minute because if you cover the cupcakes with plastic wrap after the teepees are on them, the moisture from the cupcakes tends to turn the caramel into a gooey mess.

There are 2 ways to make pilgrim hats. In the photo on the left, the hat is made from 2 Tootsie Rolls. Squeeze one roll short to form the top of the hat. Press the second Tootsie roll even flatter into a thin pancake to form the brim. Stack the first piece on top of the second piece. The second way to make a pilgrim hat  is even easier: just stack a Rolo on top of a York Peppermint Patty. If you want the proverbial buckle, cut a square out of the York wrapper, and cut a hole out of the center.

To make marshmallow bonnets, heat an apple corer over a burner and use it to melt the middle out of the marshmallows to form the rims of the bonnets. Press the inside “core”out before you remove the corer from the marshmallow, or the middle tends to slide back into the marshmallow as you pull the corer out of the marshmallow, and they are so sticky, there is no way to separate them again. Discard the marshmallow “cores” (or eat them!)  Either rub cornstarch onto the insides of the marshmallow cylinders, or leave for several days to dry out--they are too sticky to use as is. Cut each cylinder marshmallow at it’s narrowest point. Then, cut each cylinder again, this time in half lengthwise and lay the two strips over two whole marshmallows. The whole marshmallows form the bonnets, and the strips form the rims of the bonnets. To form the bonnet ties, use kitchen shears to cut around both flat ends of yet another marshmallow. If you don’t have an apple corer, you can use a paring knife heated over a burner, then cut the outer edge of the marshmallows. This all sounds complicated, but it’s not. Once you “core” the marshmallows, it is really quick to assemble the bonnets.

Note: Kitchen shears are the easiest way to cut marshmallows. They tend to get very sticky, so keep dipping them in cornstarch between each cut. Once they get too sticky, wash and dry them thoroughly, and continue cutting and dipping in cornstarch.

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