Spider Cupcakes!

Last night I attended the annual "Octoberfest" party at my dear friends' The Kucaj's house, costumes required. I wanted to bake something "Halloweeny" so I decided to try to do some fun cupcakes. I saw a pictures of some spider cupcakes on the cover of a magazine at the grocery store, and it looked pretty simple, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

As far as the type of cupcake goes, I thought I'd stick to the fall theme and bust out the pumpkin. Pumpkin Spice cupcakes with cinnamon cream cheese frosting. yum-o.

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 eggs, room temperature
3/4 cup milk
1 cup pumpkin


Mix together all your dry ingredients in a separate bowl, and set aside.

Then cream together you butter and sugars (both white and brown). Add in your eggs one at a time, waiting until the first is mixed in to add the second, then add in your milk and pumpkin.

Next, slowly add all the dry ingredients, and mix just until well combined. bust out your muffin tins, and start spooning the batter evenly into paper muffin cups.

Bake at 375 for 25 minutes. The house smelled fabulous.

While the cupcakes are cooling, mix up your frosting.

Ingredients:

8 ounces softened cream cheese

1/4 cup butter

3 cups powdered sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

I added some food coloring to get this Orange hue in honor of Halloween. I accidentally squirted myself in the eye with red food coloring, which took an awful lot of make up remover to clean off of my eye lids. Try to avoid doing this if possible.

Next I decided to tackle the spider legs. In the picture I saw it looked like they used pull apart black licorice strings, which I couldn't find anywhere. So I thought I'd do a little sculpture with tootsie rolls.

I nuked the rolls in the microwave for about 10 seconds to make them nice and pliable, then I started rolling them out into long strings. This actually took forever. Finding licorice strings would be a better plan ;)

Next I frosted all my cupcakes. And ate, oh I'd about a cup and a half, of the cinnamon cream cheese frosting in the process. That stuff is deadly. Make some now.

Then I started making my eyeballs out of Necco wafers. I cheated and used store bought decorating gel for this part.

Next, insert your eyeballs into the frosting on each cupcake. At this point, I was starting to get pretty pumped because they looked pretty hilarious. I was laughing out loud at the little critters.

So fun! Eventually I ran out of Necco wafers but still had a few cupcakes. I scoured the pantry for something else I could use for eyeballs, and found some little hard candies that actually worked out quite well.
The final step was sticking on the legs and getting them into a safely-transportable container.

Tada! My army of delicious bugs. I ended up only putting four legs on each because I was running out of time. No need to be anatomically correct when you're making bugs out of cupcakes.

And here's me and the hostess at the party. She's Snookie from Jersey Shore. I'm a Facebook page.

Happy Halloween!