Spooky Cupcakes

To say we are a “girly” household is an understatement.  Luckily my hubby is secure in his masculinity or he might begin to have a facial twitch from all the pink around here.  My girls don’t like anything remotely scary so these are the closest to spooky cupcakes you’ll see me making 🙂  Make your favorite chocolate cupcakes and frosting to begin.

The trees are made by simply piping or even spreading chocolate on wax paper.  I wish I had thought to take a picture at this point, but basically you are making a spiky T shape (the bottom line will be inserted into the cupcake for stability and the top of the T will be roots resting on top of the cupcake), with a tree on top of the T.  Separately Make 2 small triangles so that when you place the upside down T into the cupcake you can place a small triangle on the front and back to look like roots and also support the tree a little.  While the chocolate is wet sprinkle with orange sugar and some black pearls.  You could also use cake or cookie crumbs for dirt around the base.  I used some chocolate jimmies.

For the towers cover a sugar cone with chocolate and place a whopper on the top.

For ghosts, pipe white frosting, then insert chocolate coated sunflower seeds for the eyes.

In the book they stacked smaller cupcakes on top of larger cupcakes so it ended up looking like a haunted house. I thought they would look good placed on and around a small tiered cake, but this is what happened in the end.  None of the kids seemed to care. 🙂

Adapted slightly from  “What’s New, Cupcake?” by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson