Spice Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting OR Vanilla Frosting, with candy garnishes, 11/24

With Thanksgiving looming on the horizon (and a FIVE DAY WEEKEND), Cupcake Wednesday was 1) on Tuesday, and 2) dedicated to an "early" Thanksgiving. I owe credit to my nana, who alerted me to a fun episode of Paula Deen where she made some fun looking cupcakes that looked like peas and carrots, a turkey/chicken leg, and mashed potatoes. I'll be honest, the verbal description left me a little confused. How do Starburst candies make a cupcake look like mashed potatoes? Well, I caught a re-run and was HOOKED. I HAD to try making these adorable cupcakes, the brainchild of the authors of "Hello Cupcake." So, the base cupcake is spice, one batch from each of my two cupcake cookbooks (the early favorite is from "Crazy About Cupcakes"). The peas and carrots frosting is cream cheese frosting, and the rest are frosted with store-bought vanilla frosting (which normally I would oppose but the amount of frosting used to create the turkey leg is a semi-ginormous). The "peas" are M&Ms, the "carrots" are cut-up Starburst, the "butter" is the yellow Starburst, the coating for the turkey leg is cornflakes, and the "bone" is white melting chocolate in the shape of a leg bone. The "gravy" is leftover caramel frosting from the week before (how fortuitous!). They were super fun to make and received rave reviews (for both the decorations and the actual cupcake). I was so excited to share these because they are just so fun to look at, and now I think I need to add to my cookbook collection "Hello Cupcake."