Today will be my first Thanksgiving with my fiancee, Nat. We’ve known each other for years, but only as ‘friends’ so we’ve never been together for this holiday before. We’ll be hanging out with her best friend’s family in the East Bay. I’m excited, but I’m also nervous because Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays ever! I used to spend Thanksgiving with my Dad and he knew how to do Thanksgiving. Delicious turkey, stuffing, tons of gravy and the desserts, oh, the desserts!! So, to honor my Thanksgiving tradition I decided to take on a very ambitious baking project – making cupcakes that look like turkeys and pies. When Nat and I were at Michael’s the other day we came upon this book called, Hello Again, Cupcake. There are tons of amazing cupcakes in there, so Nat and I bought it and planned to make them on my day off from work yesterday. I love baking cupcakes and it is kind of what I’m known for, so I was excited. The cupcakes I chose to make were an old family recipe, chocolate mayonnaise cupcakes. You may think it sounds gross, but they are delicious! Add some cream cheese frosting to the top and voila – yum!!!
The original recipe card with my Grandma's handwriting on it.
- Here’s Nat going through the instructions to make the cupcakes.
Yummy cupcakes baking!
The construction of the turkey cupcakes was quite involved and you have to use tons of ingredients to construct them like – caramels, food coloring, grape nuts, sprinkles, corn flakes and frosting! It was impossible to document all of the steps because most of the time my hands were covered in something sticky – either from the caramels or frosting, so this is the best that I could do at the time without ruining my camera.
One of the first steps you gotta do is cover the corn flakes with green frosting because they get stuck underneath the turkey and end up looking like lettuce.
Melted green frosting.
Cornflakes in a bag.
Coated cornflakes - they took forever to dry - over an hour!
They next big step is prepping all of the caramels. I am fine if I never eat another caramel in my life after yesterday. You have to unwrap them, figure out how long to nuke them in the microwave because what is listed in the recipe book didn’t work for us, so we had to do it for about 10 seconds, then you roll them out, cut them into certain shapes and assemble! I burned the hell out of my hand on a caramel because I was trying to roll them into a ball and a super melted one squished out on my palm. I had one of those moments where I felt pain, but couldn’t get the damn caramel off of my hand fast enough – ouch! Thank goodness Nat was helping! She came to my rescue with an ice cube and a kiss.
Caramels - the entire turkey is constructed out of them!
This is a turkey body - looks easy, but not so much!
Aren't the legs cute? Sadly, we found out too late that they weighed too much, so they were falling off of our turkeys!
Now it is time to assemble the cupcakes!
You gotta put a big dollop of icing on the top because the turkey body lays directly on it.
Now here's the turkey with some green frosting at the bottom - this is where you stick the cornflakes. The white icing is where you stick the stuffing...Grapenuts/sprinkles dyed green.
Once we made one – we were jumping up and down because they were so cute! We were ridiculously proud of ourselves and so we tried to make some more. One blog we found warned us that trying to make a dozen of these things might make you lose your mind and we experienced the same thing. Sadly, we only ended up making six of these things!!
Lookie at this! Cute, right??
Close up of the stuffing. We tried to put the legs on before and after the stuffing - not sure which way worked better?
Um, yeahhhhhhh!
The turkey on the left was our 'trial' turkey and look how sad he looks compared to our cool turkey on the right!
Once we got fed up with the turkeys we tried to make some pie cupcakes. These were far easier and more fun! Nat put on all of the M&Ms and I did the icing to look like pie crust. I didn’t really get the hang of how the crust should look until the final one, but the lattice looked great on all of them. I piped the icing out of a plastic bag and got the beige color by putting some yellow food coloring & cocoa powder into the icing.
Making the icing.
Adding the pie contents. I used Reeces Pieces for mine.
Pie cupcakes. I wonder if anyone will eat the entire thing. There's about 25 pieces of candy on top of this cupcake!
The blue ones look awesome, yes?!
The best part about yesterday was that Nat and I took on this huge project and completed it with no tension or drama. I’m not sure how we’ll top this for next year’s Thanksgiving, but it was a delight working on something special with my fiancee. We’ll bring these to her Thanksgiving dinner and I can’t wait to take photos of the kid’s reactions.
Wishing everyone a super fantastic Turkey Day!
SD
OMFG! I love it!!!!!
So cute!
I might have to go find that book, I have a thing for making cupcakes and I want to challenge myself more.
That turkey cupcake looks so awesome! LOVE the idea! I’ve seen that book but I’m more the cook, not the baker…there’s a whole science to baking and I continue to fail that class lol
I need to know more about these chocolate mayo cupcakes! Please post about this sometime :-)
@Tami, you want the recipe?? Super easy and OMG so delicious.
These are absolutely adorable!! Kudos to you and Nat for attempting all of the nitty gritty details- they look fantastic!
This looks like such a fun project! and delicious too!
Yes I want it! email it to me: twogirlsequalonelove@gmail.com
My mouth literally watered just reading this post…