October 24: Cupcake Trio Day 3- Spider Friend Cupcakes

Over the past two days, I’ve shared decorating how-tos for festive Halloween cupcakes. I started with Mint Swamp Thing Cupcakes and yesterday I featured a Monster Lookout Cupcake. Today, as our third and final cupcake, I’m bringing you Spider Friend Cupcakes. 

As has been the case both other days, you’ll need cooled, baked cupcakes and vanilla buttercream to start. (The buttercream recipe can be found here.) 

Extra Ingredients for this Recipe:

Hot chocolate mix 

Fudge marshmallow cookies (like Mallomars) 

Thin gummy candies (like Sour S’ghetti or string licorice) 

Chocolate flavored Cow Tales* [sic] (Tootsie Rolls would also work)

Mini eyeball candies (2 per cupcake)

Add 3 Tablespoons of hot chocolate mix to your vanilla buttercream. (If you are dividing your recipe like I did, add only 1 Tablespoon to ONE PORTION of buttercream.) 

Lay out your cow tail candy (again, I think a tootsie roll would also work here). Use a rolling pin to flatten the candy a bit. Then cut long strips along the length of the candy. (When I bought this, I didn’t realize it had a cream center. I did my best to scrape that part off as I was cutting it into strips, but you can see there’s still some cream center remaining and it’s a little messy.) One step I didn’t do but should have done is to then cut these strips into uniform pieces. I left mine long and inconsistent and they looked kind of sloppy. So learn from my error and cut them into uniform pieces—about 3” lengths.

Alternately, you can use licorice strings (which I couldn’t find anywhere!) or the S’ghetti candies (in my photo above) which were uniform in size, but were bright colors. I used all of my chocolate cow tale [sic] candies and then supplemented with the others. So that’ll be up to you. 

Place about ½ cup of frosting in a small piping bag fitted with a Wilton 2 (small round) piping tip. Pipe small dots of frosting onto marshmallow cookies in the front of the cookie to act as eye glue. Gently place eyeball candies on top. 

See? They're cute. They have to be "friends"

Use a spoon to frost a medium-thin layer of chocolate frosting to the top of each cupcake. 

Lay eight portions of the candy strips onto the frosting to serve as legs.

The longish ones I laid right across the top 

Dollop additional chocolate frosting on top of the “legs” candy. 

Gently press the marshmallow cookie into the frosting dollop to attach. (Be careful—these cookies are delicate and the outer chocolate tends to crack.) 

There you have it. 3 days and 3 Halloween cupcakes. Whether you make one or make them all (perhaps for a Halloween class party???), they’re sure to impress. 

I had a parade of neighborhood kids in and out of the kitchen as I was decorating, and as soon as I’d snapped my last photo, I brought out the trays of finished cupcakes and served them up. The Monster Lookout variety was the first to go (kids love blue frosting and eyeball candies!) but all three types got rave reviews. 

Later that night, since I had a few extra cupcakes and buttercream and candy, I let the girls each create their own monstrous cupcakes.

They had a frighteningly good time with it! Hope you do, too. Happy decorating!