Sunflower Cupcakes

Harvest season is upon us. Pretty soon we'll be making pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie and pumpkin cookies. However, my pumpkin patch is rather unimpressive this year. I planted late and periodically forget to water. My bad...

I drove past my neighbor's house on the way home from preschool the other day and all their sunflowers hung down, weighted by their seeds, ready to be harvested. It reminded me of a sunflower cake I'd seen in a magazine. (Why wouldn't a flower remind me of a cake? It's totally normal to look at a garden and think, "Baked goods" when you look at the world through cotton-candy colored glasses.)

So, me and the kids pulled out my decorating tools and set to work on these beautiful cupcakes. You could go with the traditional yellow, but for fall, I'm partial to the orange/red sunflower.



What you'll need:
1 chocolate cake mix plus oil, water and eggs to make cupcakes.
Cup cake liners
Orange frosting
Red food coloring
Wilton tip #98
Brown sprinkles

Directions:
Bake cupcakes and allow to cool

Have the kids frost the top of each cupcake sparingly.

Run red stripes of food coloring up the inside of your piping bag. Fill the bag with orange frosting. Using a #98 tip make your petals by setting the tip at a 45 degree angle squeeze, pull back, stop squeezing. Make three or four rows. Then have the kids fill the centers with the brown sprinkles.