Creepy Cupcakes for Halloween

I love the holidays! I realized recently that I have holiday decorations up at the house about a third of the year.  I told my husband this just recently, to show him how I get a lot of use out of my investment in holiday decor. 

Besides the decor, I love to play with food to make it fun! I'm a Pinterest Junkie. If you haven't checked out my Pinterest page, you should! With over 30,000 pins organized on around 150 boards, you are sure to find something that tickles your fancy! I love to try out all the holiday goodies. For the past few years, the kiddos have gotten in to it, too. We had our annual Halloween Fun Food night just the other night. 

Before they arrived, I decided to make some cupcakes on my own, though, and I love the way they turned out. They were so much fun to make, and really super easy. I'm not a cake decorator, but these are so easy. You could make your own "from scratch" cupcakes, but I opted for a cake mix. I used one white cake mix, and after making it according to the package directions, I separated it into little bowls and added food coloring, based on what I was going to decorate it as.

Then I made a basic buttercream frosting. I know it probably doesn't make sense, considering I used a box cake mix, but I love homemade frosting, and it is so easy. You can use whatever you like, though. Again I divided it up into small bowls and added food coloring. 

To make the cupcakes in the photo, I used the following other supplies (besides cake and frosting):

1. Oreos
2. Candy Eyes
3. Gummy Worms
4. Tubes of Black & Whites Gel Frosting
5. Small Ziploc Bags

These are all pretty easy to make and don't require much in terms of directions. 

• For the White Ghost and Purple Monster, I put some frosting in the ziploc bag, cut the tip off, and squeezed the frosting onto the cupcake going around, and ending with a little peak in the center. 
• For the Mummy I spread a little of the frosting onto the cupcake, then used another ziploc bag and squeezed on the "mummy wrapping", making sure there was a place for the eyes. 
• For the Worms and Dirt cupcake I opened up some Oreos, scraped off the filling, then crushed up the chocolate cookie. I sprinkled this over brown frosting, and added the Gummy Worms.
• For the pumpkin, I put a little of the green frosting in a bag, and squeezed out the stem and leaf onto the top, adding the face with the black gel tube.
• With the Spider I used the tube of Black gel and covered the white filling so you didn't see the white of the middle. Using the same tube I made the spider legs, then put 2 small dots on the Oreo and placed the eyes on it.

TIPS:

• Putting the eyes on right after you frost makes it easy to add the eyes. If you wait, you will need to put a small amount of frosting on the back of the eye (or on the cupcake where you want the eye) because they may not stick as easily without it.
• Instead of the gel frosting tubes, you could used more frosting (colored to desired color) and squeeze from a ziploc bag, or use melting candy coating in the desired color and put it in a ziploc and squeeze on.

These were so much fun to make, and even though I know they don't compare to professionally made cupcakes, I would have no problem serving these at a Halloween party or taking to a school carnival for their bake sale. 

NOTE: The cupcakes that are orange and yellow in the photo of the unfrosted cupcakes, didn't turn out as well as I would have liked. I wanted to do a candy corn cupcake. The problem is that I used a cupcake liner, and even though it was white, you really couldn't see the layers that well. I'll try them again next year without a liner!

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