Every holiday season offers fresh opportunities to get creative with your cupcakes. From quick Halloween designs to colorful Easter toppings, you can find an almost unlimited range of seasonal decorating possibilities. Holiday-oriented cupcakes let you offer friends and family some fancy treats. Add this to my Recipe Box.
Replicate tiny Easter baskets with tinted coconut and jellybeans. Mix a few drops of green food coloring in ½ tsp. of water. Place 1 cup of flaked coconut in a large plastic storage bag, and add the food-coloring solution. Shake the bag until the coconut is tinted green. Press three jellybeans into the center of each frosted cupcake, and press tinted coconut around each cupcake's edge to serve as grass. You can also buy edible Easter basket grass from craft stores. To make grass from icing, pipe green icing onto the cupcakes through a pastry bag fitted with a No. 233 tip. If you make your grass from icing, don't frost your cupcakes before decorating them, because your icing grass will serve as the cupcake's frosting.
For a towering fall treat, transfix witches' hats to the tops of orange-frosted cupcakes. Melt 1 cup of semisweet chocolate chips with 1 tbsp. of shortening in a double boiler. Dip a corn chip into the chocolate and fix the enrobed cracker onto the top of a chocolate-covered mint cookie to complete the hat. Chill hats in the refrigerator for 10 minutes, and place one cooled hat on each cupcake. Or make skeleton cupcakes with chocolate-frosted cakes, miniature marshmallows and black-and-white gel icings. Top each cupcake with a marshmallow, and draw eyes and a mouth on the marshmallow with black gel icing. Pipe a stick figure below the marshmallow with the white icing, adding some short horizontal lines to the midsection for ribs. For haunting ghost treats, finish your cupcakes with chocolate frosting. Partially insert a peanut-butter cookie into the top of each cupcake, and frost the cookie's exposed part with white frosting. Draw scary faces on the ghosts with black gel icing.
Replicate turkeys on your cupcakes with round fudge-striped cookies, miniature peanut butter cups and autumn-colored pipe cleaners. For the tail feathers, cut a quarter of each cookie out and place the remaining cookie sideways into the top of the cupcake near the cupcake's edge. Push the cookie's cut edge into the cupcake to stabilize the cookie. For the turkey's body, place a mini peanut-butter cup on its side, with its top nestled against the cookie. Cut several pipe cleaners into smaller pieces. Bend the pipe cleaners to form the neck and head, and push them into the cupcakes, where they meet the mini peanut-butter cups. For a quick cornucopia, press a corn chip -- resting on its side -- into the top of your frosted cupcake. Surround the corn chip with small, fruit-shaped candies.
For a festive Santa look, ice your cupcake with white frosting. Add a curved swath of red icing at the top edge of the cupcake for Santa's hat. Put a miniature marshmallow on the hat for the pom-pom. Sprinkle coconut on the bottom edge for Santa's beard. Draw black eyes and red cheeks with gel icing, and add a red-hot candy for the nose. To transform your cupcakes into Christmas ornaments, frost the little cakes in various colors. Top with a miniature a peanut butter cup turned upside down, and poke a curved pretzel piece in the exposed bottom of the peanut butter cup for the hook. Place red-and-green candy-coated chocolates on the cupcakes, and draw decorative lines and patterns with red-and-green gel icing. For a snowflake design, frost half of your cupcakes with green icing and the other half with red icing. Pipe white gel icing on the surface of the cupcake in a series of symmetrical lines.
If you're in a hurry or want a more-polished decorating look, buy cupcake toppers from your local baking-supplies or crafts store. Toppers are made from fondant or hardened sugar, and come in a variety of shapes and sizes to celebrate virtually every special occasion. Some toppers lay flat on the cupcakes, while others are designed to stand up and provide height to the final creation. Some toppers come in seasonal shapes, such as hearts for Valentine's Day, and are blank, so you can write, draw or paint your own pictures and messages on your cupcakes.
