Thanksgiving Turkey Cupcakes

These were so much fun to make!

For Canadians, this was Thanksgiving day weekend. I hadn't made cupcakes for a week or two, so I went all out for this one!
I don't usually go to this much trouble to decorate cupcakes, but when I saw this idea in the book Hello Cupcake! I couldn't resist.

The cupcakes are pumpkin pie flavoured. I picked this flavour because it's a good traditional Thanksgiving flavour and because BF is allergic to it, so now that he's out of the country for a bit it's one of the few chances I have to make it (although of course I would rather have him back than all the pumpkin cupcakes in the world). They turned out perfect! So moist and fluffy, I was really pleased. The recipe is from Crazy About Cupcakes and it's basically a regular golden cupcake recipe with less milk and 1 1/2 cups of pureed pumpkin and lots of spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves). They were so good!

The tricky part was getting the same number of regular cupcakes and mini cupcakes. I basically just filled the muffin pans one cake at a time. It was a little nerve wracking though, because since I had exactly the same number of small cupcakes and regular cupcakes (the recipe made 20 of each), I couldn't eat one before decorating to test them out. This is the first time I've ever served something to people that I haven't tested myself so I was a bit scared, but luckily they turned out great.

The frosting is just a plain vanilla buttercream, spread on with a spatula rather than piped. The eyes are piped frosting.

For his tail feathers, I used maple cookies that are pretty common around here. They're sandwich cookies like Oreos, so I just split them in half and scraped off the frosting with the back of a butter knife. I think they turned out really pretty because they're such a nice shape for feathers. On each one, there are three pieces of candy corn attached with frosting. The nose is also made of candy corn, with a waddle cut from a piece of Fruit-by-the-foot.

For added decoration I used some cute Wilton autumn cupcake cups and rolled the cupcakes in some sprinkles (before the rest of the decorations of course).

I'm really pleased with how they turned out and they weren't nearly as difficult or time consuming as I would have expected. My sister helped out too so we were done really quickly. They were definitely a hit!

Update

Hi Folks,

It's been a bit of a crazy week so I haven't been making bento lunches or posting.

BF was offered an opportunity to go the the Phillipines for the next couple of months. We weren't given much warning, so the last week has been pretty hectic while he gets ready to go.

I thought it was important to let everyone here know because, given that he's the one I make the bento lunches for, it means I won't have anything to post for the little while. I expect to be going back to work in the next couple of weeks though, so I'll be making bentos for myself then.

In the meantime of course, I will continue to post the cupcakes I make (I'll have to find new people to eat them!)

So I do apologize for the lack of bento lunch posts. I'm pretty excited though about everything that's going on around here. Positive change is a good thing. Although I will miss him a lot!