This Easy, Viral Trick Makes Your Cupcakes Look Like Cute Little Pies

With the holiday season comes family time, festive decor, and pies. On Thanksgiving, Americans can't get enough of their pumpkin pie, (followed by pecan, apple, and sweet potato). But after Turkey Day has come and gone, pie season stays. If you want to participate but aren't feeling the flavor, baker and Instagram influencer @lindseybakedthis (Lindsey Katon) has the solution for you.

Katon makes her cupcakes look like sweet little versions of other treats, from corn to a pumpkin spiced latte, but her mini cherry pie imitation really takes the cake with over 968,000 likes. Here's how to make a batch of your own, whether it's for a holiday party or self care night.

How to Decorate Your Cupcakes to Look Like Mini Pies

First, start by baking a batch of cupcakes and letting them cool. Katon made yellow cupcakes, but you can choose any flavor for this design (the frosting completely covers the top). Next, use your preferred technique to get a base of red frosting on the top. You're going to smoosh this layer in the next step, so don’t worry about being too careful while applying it.

The key for getting the cherry pie look: Red M&Ms. Grab your bag, separate out a handful of the red ones, and place them in a close-knit circle with the Ms facing up. Press your cupcake frosting-side down onto them, and when you lift your cupcake up, it should display flat red candies.

Get ready to put your frosting skills to the test in the next step. Katon mixes equal parts “chocolate brown” and “lemon yellow” gel food coloring into her buttercream frosting to create a golden brown color for the "crust," she explained in the caption. Then, she uses a Wilton tip 4 to create four horizontal stripes followed by four vertical stripes on top, creating a lattice effect. For the outer crust, she used a Wilton tip 18 and the same golden brown color to pipe dollops that mimic the edges of pie crust.

Commenters on her video expressed their admiration for the idea, although many of them doubted their abilities to recreate it. "The way my attempt at recreating this would be the biggest Pinterest fail of all time 😂😍😍" one said.

“But if I bit into this and it didn’t taste like cherry…,” another wrote. And there’s a great solution to that—just add some cherry flavoring to your cake (and frosting, if you want the taste to be more obvious).

Cut your cupcake into mini pie slices to really put the ~cherry~ on top and show off your creative design.