This post brought to you by Dollar General. All opinions are 100% mine.

I'm a big fan of Halloween and all of the fun stuff that comes along with it. I especially love fun homemade treats, but I don't always have the time (or patience, or crazy decorating skills) to make cute treats. On a recent trip to Dollar General I came up with an idea that both cute and simple, requiring no artistic skills at all: witch's brew cupcakes!

Project estimate:

• Cupcake mix or ingredients, on hand or $1 and up
• Frosting, on hand or $1 and up
• Cupcake liners, on hand or $1
• Plastic tubs, 3/$1 (so $4 for one dozen)
• Pretzel sticks, on hand or $1

Total: $4 and up per dozen

This year the Halloween selections at Dollar General include a ton of things I love! I could have filled a whole cart with all of the great stuff I found. I didn't go quite that crazy, but I did walk out with quite a few fun items.

One of the items that did come home with me were these cute little plastic tubs in packages of 3 for $1. They reminded me of little cauldrons, so I thought it would be neat to do something witchy with them. And they were just the right size for holding cupcakes!

So of course, you'll need to make some cupcakes. If you're feeling like a bakerista, you can use your favorite from-scratch recipe, but I "cheated" and grabbed a boxed mix from Dollar General's baking section. Bake them and let them cool completely before you move on to decorating.

Tip: Since the cupcakes are presented inside of the plastic tubs you can't see the liners. I usually use fancy liners when I make cupcakes but in this case I used plain white liners as a money saver!

Place a cupcake into each plastic tub. (I bought 4 packages of plastic tubs so I would have enough to make a dozen cupcakes.) There will be a little bit of extra space around the edges so make sure the cupcakes are centered as well as possible.

Mix up a batch of green frosting. You can either make the frosting from scratch or buy a tub of it, but either way you will want vanilla (or other white) so that you can dye it with food coloring. Add green food coloring until you reach the desired shade of green; I also added a few drops of yellow to get the color I wanted. Frost the cupcakes as you normally would – no need to be super fancy. I just threw mine into an icing bag and squeezed a blob onto the top of each one.

Finish the look by adding a sprinkle of green sugar to the top. I think this makes them look kind of fizzy!

Just before serving, add a pretzel "spoon" to each cupcake. If you do this too far in advance the moisture in the cupcakes will make the pretzels get stale and mushy really fast, so the longer you wait to add them the better they will be! What do you think?

Do they look like little witch's cauldrons? (I know one thing for sure – they definitely didn't taste like they contained eye of newt or any other witchy ingredients. They were quite yummy!)