Halloween Cupcakes

For Halloween, I made cupcakes that look like pumpkins. Ben was particularly helpful with these cupcakes. He tried to figure out how to help me make them look exactly like the picture we saw in a magazine, right down to the indentations in the icing to make it look more pumpkin-like (you'll understand what I mean later).

I used chocolate and yellow cake mix for the cupcakes and white icing. To make the icing orange I did a little bit of elementary school thinking...what two colors make orange...red and yellow. So I took the red and yellow food coloring and put 1-2 drops of each into the icing and mixed it. Then added more until I got the orange I wanted.

The picture of Halloween cupcakes I saw had these indentations to make them look more like a pumpkin. The article suggested using toothpicks to make a line in the icing, but this did not work at all. Instead, the toothpick just got covered in icing and totally messed it up. So after a few tries, Ben and I decided to forgo using the toothpicks altogether (how important were indents in the icing, really?).

To finish them off, we put orange-tinted sparkling sugar sprinkles and pretzel sticks. I imagine that the orange sprinkles would be easier to find around Halloween, but I bet if you really needed them then a store like Hobby Lobby or Michael's would have them year-round. The pretzels were the stems and I broke them in half. However, I noticed that the pretzels get soggy after about a day, so I would not suggest eating them. Here's what the cupcakes ended up looking like:

While we're on the theme of Halloween, here's a picture of two jack-o-lanterns Ben and I carved! So cute!

We wanted to go with more traditional-like jack-o-lanterns, can't beat that.