Last year, I decided to try to incorporate food into one of my Halloween jack-o-lanterns in addition to the usual array of scary, smiling pumpkin faces. It worked out well and I came up with a creepy skeleton hand holding a cupcake. This year, I wanted to try my (non-skeleton) hand at incorporating food into my pumpkin carving again. I considered trying to go with a slice of pumpkin pie, or some other pumpkin dessert, but ultimately decided that the cupcake would be an ongoing theme. This year’s pumpkin is called “I vant a cupcake.”

It was inspired by my Vampire Cupcakes, showing a fanged pumpkin face about to dive into a moist, cherry pie-filled cupcake and ready to suck up the filling. This is one of my first attempts to sculpt a design into a pumpkin without actually cutting straight through the pumpkin itself. I used a zester that had a large opening for making twists (to garnish drinks) to carve away the outer rind in the area I wanted to put the cupcake, then used regular pumpkin carving tools to cut away the rest. I free-handed the whole design, so I can’t share a template, but one tip that will help you is to thin the pumpkin wall from the inside. A thinner wall will not only be easier to carve, but it will let more light through if you decide to try and sculpt your design.

I’m including a detail of the cupcake below, if you want to take a closer look at how I carved it out. I tried to make the outlines and lines of the wrapper deeper and brighter, while keeping the frosting more rounded and billowy.

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