Halloween is the best and most creative time to make cupcakes. Not only are the seasonal tastes, smells and harvest some of the best ingredients for the second most popular cupcake season of the year (after Christmas), the ghoulish possibilities are endless.
If you have a decent cake recipe that you can adapt, use it. If you love cupcakes, always be ready to experiment but be conservative with flavours and always trust your flour, egg and butter ratios. Don’t stray too much from what you see on the page or what you always use to make perfect sponge. The beauty of cupcakes is that a little goes a long way so be delicate with additional flavour.
Spices and ingredients that will give your sponge a nice autumn kick are; nutmeg, cinnamon, pumpkin, spiced apple and ginger.
For frosting and icing use toffee, caramel, spiced apple and vanilla. Use complimentary sponge and icing flavours such as pumpkin sponge with toffee icing and a sprinkle of nutmeg and brown sugar for garnish. Be as creative as you like or stick to simply whipped frosting on a nice sponge. If you’re confident in your skills or just want to have some extra fun, use Halloween icons to decorate your cupcakes. Witch faces, ghosts, skulls, bats and spiders are just the tip of the ‘icingberg’ if you’ll pardon the pun!
Our favourite Halloween cupcake has to be carrot cake with spiced apple sponge topped with toffee icing and a cinnamon sprinkle.
If kids are involved then we ALWAYS decorate with something a little spooky. To keep it relatively simple, go for green and grey icing and then create crazy faces with marshmallows and jelly sweets.
We recommend buying some cherry lips, false teeth sweets and crazy laces to make weird faces. Imagine a cupcake face with 7 marshmallow eyes and buck teeth or crazy tentacle hair and fangs!
Next post, we’ll bring you our favourite cupcake recipe and a few more Halloween ideas, in the meantime, have fun practising!
