Happy Halloween: Spooky Cupcake Treats!

Happy Halloween!

True confession: I have never before made cupcakes.  

I don't know how I made it through life without having to make them. I suppose it's because I don't have children and yummy cupcakes are simply a few blocks away at the bakery.  Nonetheless, a friend asked me to make some cupcakes for a Halloween party and I said, "Of course."

I then immediately headed to the internet to do some research.

Cupcake recipe?

Check!  Thanks, Rachel Ray.

Decoration inspiration?

No problem.  I saw these eyeball cupcakes on Pinterest and followed the link to the barefoot kitchen witch blog and I immediately searched Amazon for gummy eyeballs and ordered these ones.

The eyeballs arrived, but my friend announced that he needed 24 cupcakes for his party, not 12 as previously discussed.  

Oy.  

I hadn't ordered enough eyeballs.  (Don't you hate it when that happens?)

So, I went back to the internet to do some hunting for inspiration and ran across these Halloween treats called Spider Bites.  They weren't meant to be cupcake toppers, but I thought I could make them work!

And thusly a magical day of cupcake making began.

You can watch the video for all the details on how the cupcakes came together:

I definitely had a few issues along the way....

The recipe said to fill the cupcake wrappers almost all the way to the top.  I ran out of batter a little more than half way through.  So, my definition of "almost all the way to the top" and Rachel Ray's definition of that phrase are different.  I ended up siphoning off some batter from already filled cups and it was fine.

I had four colors of food coloring: red, yellow, green, and blue and a tub of white icing.  I needed to make orange icing, flesh colored icing (in two tones), and brownish/black icing.  Thank goodness I've spent years studying color mixing.  All that practice with paint worked with icing!  Hooray!

The spiders were fairly delicate and I broke the legs off a few of them when I dropped them on the floor (in a container, btw).  Luckily I had made some extras, assuming that I'd be a klutz somewhere along the way.  Whew.

I ran out of official "piping bags" and ended up using a plastic sandwich bag.  It worked great!  In fact, I'm feeling like maybe I don't have to buy piping bags ever again.

As with everything in life, necessity is the mother of invention and true satisfaction in a job well done comes after a bit of struggle.

So, here are the cupcakes in all of their glory:

Hope you have a Happy Halloween filled with treats and not tricks!

Thanks for stopping by!