I first made these cupcakes several years back for the younger children at Thanksgiving. There just isn’t a lot of kid friendly food at Thanksgiving. But, these are very kid friendly! The first thing the kids did was bite the turkeys’ heads off. The great thing about these cupcakes is that they are pretty adult friendly too. I mean there is a certain amount of time involved in decorating cupcakes, but these are pretty easy and don’t take a tremendous amount of time at least when compared to some of the others I have seen.
The cupcakes themselves are even easy. I used the crazy or wacky chocolate cake recipe that has supposedly been around since the Great Depression when many people couldn’t afford milk, eggs, and butter. I have been making wacky cakes of all different flavors since my daughter was little because she was extremely allergic to milk and eggs. Even though I used butter for the icing here, I made wacky chocolate cake because it is good and easy. I also wanted to spend my time decorating instead of baking – though the decorating here is pretty quick and easy.
Easy Turkey Cupcakes
Prep
Cook
Total
Yield 18
Ingredients
Cupcakes
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 cups sugar
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- 2 teaspoon salt
- 6 tablespoons cocoa
- 1 cup canola oil
- 2 tablespoons white vinegar
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 2 cups cool water
Icing
- 1 pound butter at room temperature
- 2 pounds confectioners’ sugar
- 1 tablespoon vanilla
- 1/2 cup cocoa
- 6 tablespoons milk or water
To Decorate
- red and yellow paste food coloring
- google eyes
- decorator bags
- very small round decorator tip, medium round decorator tip, leaf tip
Instructions
Cake
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Line the cavities of 18 muffin cups with cupcake liners.
- In a large bowl, whisk together dry ingredients until well combined. Make a well in the center,and wet ingredients and whisk together until well mixed.
- Fill muffin cups 2/3 to 3/4 full.
- Bake 18 – 22 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in the center of one of the cupcakes comes out clean.
- Allow to cool ten minutes in the pan and then remove to a wire rack.
- Cool completely before frosting.
Icing
- See the photos above if you have questions about how to decorate any of these things.
- With an electric mixer, beat together butter, sugar and vanilla until well blended.
- Add milk or water and blend until well combined.
- Remove half of the icing from the mixer, and mix cocoa into the remaining icing.
To Decorate
- Color half of the white icing red and half yellow. Mix together half of the yellow and half of the red icing to make orange icing.
- Ice each cupcake with chocolate frosting, just spreading it over the tops.
- Use the medium round tip to pipe heads with the chocolate frosting.
- Press google eyes onto the heads.
- Using the yellow icing and leaf tip, pipe a beak under the eyes of each turkey.
- Using the red icing and the small round tip, pipe the wattle.
- Using the leaf tip and the red, orange,and yellow icings, pipe the tail feathers.
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These are so cute. I met some real, actual turkeys a few years ago at the chicken auction and I was surprised at how colourful the males are. Well I shouldn’t be because I know the males are the pretty ones when it comes to birds, but they had some amazing metallic type feathers.. 🙂
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Snoskred
http://www.snoskred.org
these are really cute!
So cute and I am certain they are yummy too! Stopping by from Foodie Fridays.
These are so cute and sounds delicious too. Decorating cupcakes is not so easy for me but your collage tutorial looks like I might be able to do this. Thanks so much for sharing with Foodie Friends Friday this week. Pinned/sharing.