10.23Scarey Time of Year | Halloween Cupcakes
Every year, the “Blue Baker” and I decorate cupcakes for Halloween. It’s been a tradition watching my granddaughter become more accomplished in her pastry decorative skills. I have a drawer full of pastry tubes, tips, sprinkles and tubes of food coloring in my kitchen that I can no longer close, because we’ve crammed so much stuff into it.
The black, scary spider cupcake design pictured above, from Martha Stewart, remains a mainstay during our Halloween ritual. Here, ordinary chocolate cupcakes are transformed into scary spiders, complete with black licorice spider legs, red hots for eyes and cup up marshmellows for fangs.
Now that she is 12, the “Blue Baker” gets her own inspiration from books, magazines, the internet and on Instagram this year. And so our annual ritual began this week. After baking three dozen cupcakes of all sizes, my “Blue Baker” decided that we would make our favorite frosting. You will remember my childhood favorite “Mint Frosting from Arthur’s Bakery. As usual, my baker always likes to put her own “spin” on the recipe. Instead of green mint flavoring, she decided that orange coloring was more in line with Halloween.
We wanted to get straight to the decorating, so we used Betty Crocker cake mix and made the frosting from scratch. It was perfect. This gave us time to quickly get the cupcakes in the oven and focus our efforts on our frosting and decorations. We put a dozen cupcakes in the freezer, just so we could pull out for another day without any fuss and mess. The above photo is this year’s version of a pumpkin patch!
So, pull your favorite designs and go to work. Halloween is right around the corner!
– The Gourmet Review and the “Blue Baker”