I made these cupcakes November 23rd, the Monday before Thanksgiving. My office was having a Thanksgiving potluck and I did bring Brown Sugar Roasted Acorn Squash & Sweet Potatoes, but just in case that flopped, I brought these.

They may look entirely homemade, but they’re not! I used a Sprinkles Banana Cupcake mix that I found at the Williams Sonoma outlet and used canned cream cheese frosting. All of my effort went into making the decorations. I dyed half the frosting orange and paired those cupcakes up with lighter-dyed fondant flowers. The darker flowers were paired with the original frosting. I had leftover wax-lined (read: not safe for baking!) party cups, so I poked holes through them and tied them with orange curling ribbon.

I used the smallest biscuit cutter from this set to make the flower, and the diamond from this bento cutter set. The brown/yellow circles came with the Sprinkles set as decoration.

I hadn’t received my plates yet to go with this stand (7″ plates from Dollar Tree, but you can only buy by the case so I paid basically $10 a plate), so I cut some circles out of wrapping paper and “laminated” them with packaging tape. I had to take these cupcakes on the metro and they were sliding around a lot. I alternated the cupcakes in the box (don’t know what I did that), so all the white cupcakes had a little orange on them. I need a cupcake carrier! Do you think I can justify its real estate in my apartment?