Let your child help you decorate these fall baked goods.
Burnt sienna, copper and pumpkin orange conjure up images of the harvest time of year when leaves fall from the trees and the nights get shorter. Bring the colors of autumn indoors and decorate cupcakes for a seasonal treat, or design your cupcakes with objects or images related to fall holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Labor Day or Halloween. Remember to decorate the insides of the cupcakes as well with fall flavors like apple, pumpkin, maple syrup and cinnamon.
Instructions
Fall Foliage
1. Bake 12 apple or pumpkin cupcakes using an acorn-shaped muffin tin. Remove baked cupcakes from the pan and let cool before decorating.
2. Mix five or six small balls of marzipan each with a different color of food coloring gel, including red, purple, orange, yellow and brown. Flatten the marzipan to 1/8 inch thick. Cut miniature leaves out of the colored marzipan using a paring knife or leaf-shaped cookie cutter.
3. Use the dull side of the paring knife blade to press a vertical line across each leaf and horizontal lines to the edges of the leaves as the veins of the leaves. Paint the surface of the leaves with edible gold paint.
4. Mix 1 cup of white icing with green food coloring gel. Ice the tops of the cupcakes with the green icing. On each cupcake, place a ring of leaves in varying colors around the outer edge with the tips pointed out.
5. Continue with rings of leaves overlapping until you reach the center of the cupcake. Stick three leaves with the tips pointed up at an angle.
6. Sprinkle a small amount of edible gold glitter over the leaves for a finishing touch.
Pumpkin Cupcakes
7. Use 12 cinnamon-flavored cupcakes baked in pumpkin shapes. Cover each cooled cupcake with cream cheese icing.
8. Mix together orange food coloring gel and three cups of marzipan. Roll 12 pieces of the orange marzipan into 2-inch balls. Press one side of the balls in to form the top of the pumpkins. Use the dull side of the paring knife blade to press indentations vertically around the pumpkins to mimic real pumpkins. Place on the center of the iced cupcakes.
9. Mix one cup of marzipan with green food coloring gel and roll out 12 6-inch-long thin snake shapes. Cut 1/8-inch pieces off the end of each green snake and insert these into the top of each pumpkin as the stem.
10. Stick one end of each rolled green marzipan stem into the top of each pumpkin. Curl the rest of the marzipan and let it fall down the pumpkin and onto the cupcake to form a pumpkin vine.
11. Sprinkle edible gold glitter over each pumpkin-topped cupcake.
Tags: food coloring, edible gold, paring knife, with green, apple pumpkin
