Fall Tree Cupcakes

I hosted a bookclub at my house last week and our book was about a little southern town named after a tree. I decided to make these cupcakes with fall trees on them for bookclub, and the left over ones went right along with our "Fall" Preschool Theme!

2 birds. 1 stone. That's how I roll. :)

They turned out really cool and were SO easy to make! I'm tellin' ya.

• I just made red velvet cupcakes (box mix) and put on some vanilla frosting (canned)
• Then I melted some chocolate and put it into a ziploc baggie. (The easiest way to put chocolate or frosting into a baggie for piping is to put the baggie in a cup or bowl and unfold the bag around the edges of the cup so you just have to plop it in without making a mess.) :)
• I let the chocolate cool a bit in the baggie so it didn't come out runny.
• So after it cooled a bit, I cut off the corner of the baggie and piped the chocolate onto a cookie sheet. (Use a liner or parchment paper so it doesn't stick). I piped the chocolate into tree trunks with bare branches. I also made the end of the trunks kind of pointy so they were easier to poke into the cupcakes.
• I did about 4 tree shapes at a time--before the chocolate could set too much, I sprinkled colored sprinkles over the bare branches to look like fall leaves. (Except for blue, of course. I just used a bunch of colorful sprinkles I had and MOST of the colors were fall-ish. But I was too lazy to pick out all the blue ones, so there you go.) :)

They looked kind of haphazard when I first piped them, but that's ok! Each tree was unique, and when they dried, the piped chocolate even made the tree trunks look bumpy & textured like a real tree would be.

 Pretty cool, eh?

So, once they dried, I took one tree at a time and poked it into one of the frosted cupcakes, like so:

And voila! Fall Tree Cupcakes for all to enjoy!