How to Make Candy Corn Cupcakes

This was the last Halloween inspired cupcake my mom and I came up with.  We made ghosts, mummies, spiderwebs, and pumpkins, but something was still missing.  After some careful pondering, we realized that while all the cupcakes looked great on their own, a pop of color and a little brightness was definitely missing.  My mom kept saying, "You need something yellow."  Enter candy corn cupcakes.

   
These cupcakes are pretty cool I think.  I wanted to make a play on candy corn without having to actually make a white cake batter and dye it different colors (this can be a hassle if you only want a few cupcakes to be decorated like this, instead of a whole batch), so playing with frosting was what I decided to do.  Yes, this is another cupcake that's all about the frosting (remember, I'm pretending I actually like frosting right now).  

I had been wanting to do a frosting technique like this for a very long time, but was never really sure how to go about it.  I just felt like it would end up being messier process than I wanted, but after making them, I saw that it's really not a hard or messy process at all!  It's a little bit of extra work, I'll give you that, but the tri-color frosting effect is just too awesome to pass up.  Yes. These cupcakes are just awesome.  Tri-colored frosting is awesome. 

Candy Corn Cupcakes

Things You'll Need

cupcakes, any flavor

white icing

food coloring (I used Wilton icing gels)

piping bags (large disposable plastic bags work well too)

large star tip

How to Make Candy Corn Cupcakes

The trickiest part about making these cupcakes is filling the piping bag.  Once you get past that, frosting the cupcakes is a piece of cake!  To start, divide your frosting into three equal parts.  Dye one third orange, one third yellow, and leave the last third white.  

To create the tri-color frosting, take a large piping bag fitted with a large star tip (I used a disposable bag) and carefully fill the 1/3 of the bag with each color, one at a time.  Do your best to keep the colors as separated as possible so that they do not mix too much while the frosting is still inside the piping bag.  An easy way to do this is to put each color frosting into its own bag, and then pipe all the frosting into a third of the piping bag that will be used to frost the cupcakes.  Once the piping bag is ready, simply pipe out the frosting over the tops of the cupcakes, and adorn with candy corn if desired.  Simple!