Halloween Cupcakes

Halloween is fast approaching-do you have your cupcake recipes and ideas ready? Decorating cupcakes for Halloween is next only to Christmas cookies in baking fun for this household. There are so many fun, exciting Halloween cupcake ideas to be tried and enjoyed. So many that we rarely repeat a Halloween cupcake design the next year!
Here are several of our favorite Halloween cupcake decoration ideas-pick a couple (or more) and have a frightfully fun time at your house this Halloween.
Mummy Cupcakes:
These yummy little mummy Halloween cupcakes are really easy to make and do not require any hard-to-find ingredients or masterful skills in cake decorating!

Ingredients:
Bake up a dozen cupcakes using your favorite cake recipe(or box)
Tubes of cake icing-yellow, black, and white

Decorating details:
Using the white icing, criss cross the cupcake(as if bandaging your Halloween mummy), being sure to leave space for the eyes.
Take the yellow icing and make two eyes in the space left, then use the black icing to make pupils atop the yellow eyes.
Ta-da, how easy was that?!?

Next up is a fun Halloween cupcake idea-spider web cupcakes.
Needed ingredients are cupcakes, cake icing, green food coloring, foil and black shoestring licorice.
In this recipe, you will take a dozen cupcakes(that recipe of yours again!) and smoothly frost them with a frosting colored with food coloring to a green shade you like and attach mini spider candies or using black gel icing to create your own tiny critters.
Place the iced cupcakes on a cake board or cardboard covered with foil and use the black shoestring licorice to create the spider web crisscrossing the cupcakes. How's that for Halloween fun?

Monster Cupcakes:
While a little more involved than some, these are still easy to make and will be almost to cute to eat!
First, the ingredients:

Bake up two dozen cupcakes using your favorite cake recipe(from scratch or the infamous box, whatever works for you!)
1 box vanilla flavored instant pudding(3.4 ounce box)
green food coloring
1 box of green melting candy(like Wilton's)
24 large marshmallows
skewers
wax paper lined baking sheet
mini M&Ms
small serrated knife
chocolate cake frosting
black gel icing
2 green tic tac mints

Now, for the steps in making these Monster Cupcakes for Halloween:

1. Bake the cupcakes(2 dozen as mentioned above). Prepare the vanilla
   flavored pudding as directed on the box, then stir in drops of the
   green food coloring until you have the shade of green you want.
   Refrigerate the pudding.
   
2. Microwave 1 cup of the green melting candy(found in party supply stores and
   sometimes Walmart). Melt this candy slowly, for one minute then stir
   and follow with 15 second increments-stirring until melted to the
   desired consistency. One at a time, put the marshmallows on a skewer
   and dip in the melted candy and roll them, coating completely. Place
   each candy-coated marshmallow on the wax paper lined baking sheet,
   add the mini M&Ms for eyes and place the baking sheet in the
   refrigerator to chill.
   
3. Going to the cupcakes, using your small serrated knife, cut a 1-inch wide
   section from the middle of each cupcake, fill each of these holes
   with the green pudding you made earlier, then spread chocolate
   frosting atop the cupcake, around each pudding hole.
   
4. Place a chilled marshmallow atop each pudding pool and add black gel
   facial features along with the green tic tac mints for bolts.
   
5. Lastly, top each little monster head(that's the marshmallow) with chocolate
   frosting and mess it up gently with your fingertip or a
   fork-creating messy little hair for your monsters.

Keep your little sweet treat monsters chilled until time to serve and enjoy!
I hope you and yours will find one or more of these fun Halloween cupcake recipes fun to use at your own Halloween celebration.
Happy Halloween!