Fall cupcakes

After a Sunday afternoon of cleaning light fixtures and window shades, I decided to take those 6 cupcakes left over from the princess cake batter and create a fall cupcake centerpiece.

Here's what I used:

milk chocolate

white chocolate

vanilla frosting- colored orange and yellow

toothpicks

pumpkin candy corn

wax paper

food coloring

Ziplocks for piping

chocolate sprinkles

cupcakes

The chocolate leaves trimmed the plate:

I melted the chocolate in the microwave and then added food coloring for yellow, orange and reddish chocolate to swirl through the milk chocolate. Tip: I overcooked the red and it became a crystallized glob as you can see at the top of the photo below...
Blob a little of each color while the chocolate is still melted and swirl with a toothpick before the chocolate cools:
The more you swirl, the more swirl you'll end up with:
Take mini leaf cookie cutters and press into the set chocolate. The tricky part is removing the chocolate leaf from the cutter. Be patient. The warmth of your hands should soften the chocolate enough to free from the edge without breaking.
For the trees, I drizzled chocolate over a toothpick with a spoon. The toothpick makes it easier to insert the chocolate into the cupcake without the trunk breaking in two. You may have to make extra trees so you can toss any glob trees, as shown on the top left. I ended up with a good 3 out of 5 trees.
Let the trees set and then peel from the wax paper:
Frost the cupcake with green frosting and then stick the tree into the frosted cupcakes. Pipe scattered leaves on the branches and on top of the green frosting for fallen leaves. I also added a candy corn pumpkin. Sprinkle a few chocolate sprinkles for fallen twigs.
Oh, and I added a foil liner to hide the pink princess cupcake liner (it just didn't go with the fall theme).
We placed the cupcakes in the center of the table for our impromptu "dinner party". The kids got a kick out of it. A cupcake for no reason?? Of course!