How to Make Royal Icing Pumpkins
Royal Icing Pumpkins are an easy, adorable way to add a festive fall touch to cupcakes, cookies, and other desserts!
Made with just orange and green royal icing, these little pumpkin decorations are piped onto parchment paper and left to dry overnight. Make them ahead of time, and you’ll have cute, edible decorations ready to dress up your favorite fall treats. I especially love how they look on pumpkin spice cupcakes topped with chocolate frosting!
You can make them in different sizes to fit your desserts, and they’re a fun way to turn simple cupcakes into something special for Halloween, Thanksgiving, or any fall gathering.

Create your very own pumpkin patch.
It’s easy, trust me!
I had leftover royal icing from decorating cookies and tinted 1 cup of it orange and a 1/4 cup of it green.
I use Callye, Sweet Sugar Belle’s Royal Icing Recipe.
I used a #10 piping tip and piped out a pumpkin shape onto parchment paper on a cookie sheet pan. Then I piped on the green stems with a leaf tip.
I let them dry overnight.
Then I lifted them off the parchment paper and place them on a wire rack to be sure the bottoms had dried also, for an hour or so.
I baked up some yummy Pumpkin Spice cupcakes with Chocolate Pumpkin Spice Frosting.

Although you need to make the pumpkins a day ahead they are really easy and make for some really cute cupcake toppers.

Come check out more on Royal Icing here. From Halloween to Christmas, decorating cookies and more.
Royal Icing Pumpkins
Ingredients
- 1 box French Vanilla Cake mix
- Ingredients to prepare mix
- replace 1/2 the water with pumpkin puree
- 2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
Instructions
- Prepare the mix according to package directions replacing 1/2 the water with pumpkin puree and adding 2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice.
- Cool cupcakes completely before icing.
- Place pumpkin on frosting close to serving. The moisture of the frosting will soften the pumpkins, so don’t apply them a day ahead of serving.
Notes
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup shortening
4 cups powdered sugar
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup cocoa
Beat butter add shortening, sugar, cream, pumpkin pie spice, vanilla and cocoa and mix until smooth.


What a great cupcake topper, you could make a whole pumpkin patch!
SO cute Diane!
just pinned these! LOVE
These really are darn cute! I hope you don’t need a lot of decorating skills to make these work, because I don’t have many!
you will be so happy then, because they are super easy 🙂
Stunning!
These cupcakes are super cute! 🙂
These are so cute – what a great idea to decorate cupcakes this way!
What a great idea…at first look, I thought the pumpkins were sugar cookies iced with orange/green. Not until I read the entire thing did I realize it was only royal icing. I will have to do this with my left over icing tonight. Thanks so much.
These are adorable. I love the color scheme you chose!
These are adorable! What a great way to use up some extra frosting!
Those are so cute!!! The perfect bright touch to those awesome cupcakes!!!
What a great idea! I always have left over royal icing, but never know what to do with it. I’m definitely keeping this trick in mind.
And I love that you use shortening in your frosting too! I’ve been doing that for years and always get phenomenal results (compared to when I use all butter).
The pumpkins look adorable. Great tips.