How to Make Halloween Cupcakes

Halloween presents a great opportunity to dress up food as well as people, and one of the easiest ways to do this is with cupcakes. Halloween cupcakes can range from simple desserts--topping a cupcake with a small candy pumpkin, to turning a cupcake into a cockroach. Mahalo did a video series on Halloween cupcakes this year, and while reviewing them, I was reminded of my favorite way to decorate pumpkin cupcakes. These pumpkin cupcakes take only minutes to frost and decorate- and you probably have everything you need in the kitchen already.

What you need:

*Cupcakes of your choice, cooled and ready to be frosted
*Container of vanilla frosting
*Orange food coloring
*Orange decorating sugar
*Pretzel rods, broken into short pieces about 1" long

Step 1: Scrape the container of frosting into a mixing bowl.

Step 2: Add several drops of food coloring, and combine with an electric mixer until blended. Repeat if the color isn't dark enough, continuing until you're happy with the hue.

Step 3: Mound frosting on the cupcake, smoothing the top as much as possible.

Step 4: Roll each cupcake in decorating sugar.

Step 5: Use a bamboo skewer to draw segments radiating out from a bit off center of the cupcake. (A toothpick will make too thin a line).

Step 6: Insert a piece of pretzel rod where the segments meet.

If you feel like trying out Mahalo's version, you can check out their video tutorial on How to Decorate Pumpkin Cupcakes here.