Dirt Cupcakes

For some reason I love making dirt cupcakes, especially in the Fall! Last year, at the end of October I made cupcakes that were decorated as spiders, pumpkins, and dirt. While the others were laborious and time consuming, the dirt cupcakes were easy and fun. I decided that this year I wasn't going to mess around with difficult decorations and instead just went straight to fun!

You can either use a box cake mix or make them from scratch. I have used both. This year, for the sake of time, I went with box mix. I made two batches, one yellow cake and the other chocolate. Yes, I used the frosting in a can because sometimes it's just easier. After frosting both sets of cupcakes, I set a gummy worm in the middle and then sprinkled crushed up chocolate animal crackers over the top. The animal crackers worked great. Last year was a disaster. I couldn't find plain chocolate cookies so I instead bought oreos. Unfortunately, when you crush oreos the filling still shows white and all the cookie crumbs stick together. I ended up scraping the filling out of the oreos and crushing just the cookies. Like I said, this year was much easier. Thank goodness for chocolate animal crackers! Enjoy!