Thanksgiving Cupcake & Cake Ideas

Create a cornucopia cake topper out of fondant or marzipan.cornucopia image by Liz Van Steenburgh from Fotolia.com

At Thanksgiving, there's a lot of great food. However, when it comes to dessert, part of the challenge is making something that looks so good, everyone at the dinner table will want to save room for it. Pumpkin and other pies are traditional, but making cake or cupcakes in designs your guests can't resist will help ensure that even full guests will try your dessert.

Miniature Turkey Cupcakes

Grab your favorite cake recipe and bake as many cupcakes as you like. Roll out some fondant or marzipan, which is modeling clay-like dough made from almond paste; color it with gel food dyes in orange, brown, red and yellow. Frost the cupcakes with a thin layer of icing. Roll out a flat, smooth brown disc of fondant or marzipan to cover the top of each cupcake. Fondant and marzipan mold like clay, so use your clay modeling skills to shape a light brown turkey neck and head and a yellow beak and squish it into place. Form some simple multicolored feathers to stick at the back of the cupcake for the turkey's tail. Repeat for each of the remaining cupcakes.

Bake your favorite cake recipe in round or rectangular cake pans. Frost with your desired autumnal frosting, such as a pumpkin or maple. Craft a cornucopia out of colored fondant or marzipan, making sure to hollow it out so you can insert some of your other decorations inside. Mold various fruits, vegetables, meats, baked goods and all your family's favorite foods to the scale of the cornucopia. Place them so they appear to be coming out of the cornucopia and spilling onto the cake. If you wish, place a layer of fondant made to look like a tablecloth on the cake first. Place the cornucopia in the middle as if it's a table centerpiece. To carry the theme further, craft miniature dinnerware out of fondant or marzipan as well to echo your Thanksgiving dinner table.

Most specialty baking shops sell a pumpkin-shaped pan, which lets you bake two halves of a pumpkin-shaped cake in separate pan cavities for even baking. Use a pumpkin cake recipe. When the full cake is baked and cooled, adhere the top half to the bottom half with frosting, resulting in a cake shaped like a three-dimensional pumpkin. Cut the cake into layers and fill between them with a cream cheese frosting. Decorate the body of the pumpkin with orange frosting, the stem with brown frosting and the leaf with green, if your pumpkin pan includes a leaf. Place the iced pumpkin cake on a platter, then create a bed of greenery with silk vines and leaves from a craft store as a finishing touch for your pumpkin centerpiece cake.