Halloween Cupcakes and Cakes You Can Actually Pull Off

I am not a decorator. I want to be clear about that up front, because there are people on the internet who can pipe a realistic spider out of buttercream and I am not one of them and I have made peace with it somewhere around year three of parenting.

What I can do is a handful of tricks that make a very ordinary cake look like somebody tried. All of them are things I have done in my own kitchen with a boxed mix, a cheap piping bag, and a toddler asking to help in a way that is not actually helping. Also I am going to tell you about the black frosting incident, which is still brought up at family dinners.

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Start With a Boxed Mix, Upgraded

I use a box. But I swap the water for whole milk, the oil for an equal amount of melted butter, and add one extra egg plus a teaspoon of vanilla. That is it. It takes ninety seconds of extra effort and the texture goes from spongy and thin to dense and actually good. Nobody has ever guessed.

Fill cupcake liners two thirds full, not to the top. Overfilled liners spill over and give you a flat mushroom top you cannot frost neatly. A standard box makes 24 cupcakes at 350 for 18 to 20 minutes.

The Buttercream Ratio to Memorize

One cup of softened butter, 4 cups of powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons heavy cream, 1 teaspoon vanilla, and a quarter teaspoon of salt. Beat the butter alone for a full 3 minutes before adding anything, until it is pale and fluffy. This step is the one everybody skips and it is why homemade frosting sometimes tastes greasy. Frosts 24 cupcakes generously.

If it is too stiff, add cream a teaspoon at a time. If it is too loose, more powdered sugar. If it is grainy, it just needs to beat longer.

Spiderweb Cupcakes

Frost a cupcake flat and smooth with an offset spatula. Pipe three concentric circles of a contrasting color on top, then drag a toothpick from the center out to the edge in six or eight lines. Wipe the toothpick between drags or you smear the web into mud.

Flat is important here. A swirled dome will not hold a web pattern. This is the one Halloween decoration that requires no piping skill at all and looks like it required several.

Monster Cupcakes

Tint the buttercream green or purple, use a grass tip to pipe short fuzzy strokes all over the top, and press on two candy eyeballs. That is the whole thing. The grass tip does all the work and it is the most forgiving tip in existence because the entire point is that it looks messy. A basic piping bag and tip set with a grass tip, a star tip, and a round tip covers every single thing in this post.

Graveyard Sheet Cake

The easiest impressive cake there is. Bake a chocolate sheet cake in a 9 by 13, cool it completely, frost with chocolate buttercream, then cover the whole top in crushed Oreos with the filling scraped out. Stand Milano cookies up as headstones with RIP written in black gel icing, add a few gummy worms crawling out, and dust the edges with green tinted coconut for grass.

Do not put the headstones in until an hour before serving. Cookies absorb moisture from frosting and after three hours your entire graveyard will be lying down, which is either a problem or a joke depending on your mood.

Pumpkin Patch Cupcakes

Chocolate cupcakes, chocolate frosting, crushed Oreo dirt, and a candy pumpkin on top with a small piped green vine. Four ingredients past the cupcake itself and it takes about thirty seconds each. This is what I send to school parties because it survives a car ride and a hallway.

Orange Bundt With a Glaze

If you do not want to decorate at all, a bundt is the answer. Bake any cake in a well greased bundt at 350 for 45 to 50 minutes. Grease it with baking spray that contains flour, get into every crevice, and let it cool in the pan exactly 10 minutes before turning out. Less than 10 and it falls apart. More than 15 and it welds itself to the pan.

Glaze is 2 cups powdered sugar, 3 tablespoons milk, and orange gel coloring, whisked until it ribbons off the whisk. Pour it over while the cake is completely cool so it sets in drips instead of soaking in.

The Black Frosting Disaster

Last year I decided to make black buttercream. I added black gel coloring. It went gray. I added more. Still gray. I added an entire bottle, which is roughly the amount you would use for six batches, and it finally got to a sort of charcoal, and I put it on cupcakes and served it to nine people at a party.

Every one of them had gray teeth and a gray tongue for the rest of the night. It also tasted faintly bitter, which is what happens when you use that much dye. Photos exist. My mother-in-law smiled with her mouth closed in all of them.

Here is the actual fix. Start with chocolate buttercream, not vanilla, so you are darkening brown instead of white. Add a moderate amount of black gel color, then cover it and let it sit for 3 to 4 hours. The color deepens dramatically as it rests. You will need maybe a quarter of what you thought. A decent gel food coloring set also goes much further than the liquid kind from the grocery store baking aisle, which is mostly water and will thin your frosting before it colors it.

Getting Them There in One Piece

Frosted cupcakes slide. They tip. They end up face down on the floor mat of your car, which has happened to me at a stoplight on Ward Parkway. A real cupcake carrier with individual wells is not a splurge if you do this more than twice a year. Chill frosted cupcakes for 20 minutes before transport so the buttercream firms up.

Make Ahead Windows

• Unfrosted cupcakes, airtight at room temperature, 2 days, or frozen 2 months
• Buttercream, in the fridge 1 week, but bring to room temperature and re-whip for 2 minutes before using
• Frosted and decorated, best within 24 hours
• Sheet cake, frosted and covered, 2 days, but hold the cookie decorations until the day of

What I Would Skip

Fondant. Anything requiring a crumb coat plus a chill plus a second coat on a weeknight. Two tiered anything. And skip trying to match a specific reference photo, because that is where the fun leaves the room and the frustration walks in.

Go Make Something Slightly Lopsided

Truly, the spiderweb trick alone will carry you. Flat frosting, three circles, a toothpick. Nine seconds of skill for a cupcake people photograph.

If you have cracked black frosting without the gray teeth situation, please tell me in the comments. I am still a little scarred.

So glad you are here. Pam