For the Halloween party on Saturday, I made some Rocky Road cupcakes decorated to look like pumpkins! While the cupcake base ended up being a bit of a flop (somehow, the cake came out to be oddly dense), the frosted decorating turned out decent and was a lot of fun, so I wanted to share it here! We looked around at different baking blogs and sort of took techniques and tips from a bunch of them to decorate these:
For the frosting, I chose to color some cream cheese frosting orange… because I LOVE cream cheese frosting! But buttercream and most other light-colored frostings can be used and colored, too.
To achieve the sparkly rough texture, you then roll the frosted cupcake in some orange sugar. You can buy the colored sugar, or color regular granulated sugar yourself with food coloring, as we did.
Taking a toothpick or chopstick, press the edge against the top of the cupcake and repeat a few times around the cupcake to get the ridged look of the pumpkin. Then use some green colored frosting (we used the same cream cheese frosting and had set aside some before we colored it orange, and colored the remaining portion green) to pipe on vines, stems, and leaves. (Another baking blog showed how you could use green string licorice to create the vines, which I thought was really neat, but we had no idea where to get green string licorice and didn’t really have the time to go look for it, either. Cool idea, though!)
A video of the piping… (Please excuse my text message alert and Mio’s sigh towards the end. haha*)
I loved this decorating idea, and hope that it can be an inspiration to others, too! I think it’s a great idea for not only Halloween, but for Thanksgiving and throughout the fall season. Trust me — if I can do it, you can do it! I’d like to thank my sous chef Dan as usual… it’s awesome having a hubby that doesn’t mind being an assistant to all my baking endeavors!
