Mini Black Licorice Cupcakes for Halloween

In my last post, I asked you to guess which flavor of licorice I'd be using in my licorice cupcakes.  The answer is black licorice!  Black licorice is a love it or hate it flavor and I saw some strong opinions about it in the contest comments.  Even if you fall into the "hate it" category, I hope you'll consider giving these black licorice cupcakes a try.  Flavors taste different in different formats.  Some people enjoy bananas, but can't stand banana bread; others detest tomatoes and adore tomato sauce.  Likewise, several anti-licorice tasters raved about my licorice cupcakes.  

Before I developed the licorice cupcake recipe, I made homemade black licorice to see firsthand how to achieve the distinct flavor of black licorice.  (I didn't post about the candy itself because I wasn't able to get the texture quite right.  If I master it, I'll share it.)  The black licorice recipe was made using dark corn syrup,  molasses, and anise extract, so I used those same ingredients in my black licorice cupcakes.  It worked!  The cupcakes truly taste like a cupcake form of black licorice. 

To get the black licorice cupcake recipe, head over to Paula Deen's website.  I'm a regular guest contributor on her site and the black licorice cupcakes were my contribution for Halloween!

And the winner is...

Halloween Cupcakes - Ghosts Made Without Fondant

Halloween cupcakes in previous years have included witch Halloween cupcakes and scary Halloween cupcakes with googly eyes.  I've even made Halloween cupcakes with garlic to scare off vampires!  This year, I opted to make ghost Halloween cupcakes!

I've seen many ghost cupcakes made with fondant (and they are totally impressive), but I wanted to make ghost cupcakes with something that I love to eat - crepes!  Take any cupcakes (I used my apple cobbler cupcakes with pumpkin pie frosting), drape them in mini crepes, use chocolate chips for eyes, and you've got ghost Halloween cupcakes ideal for a Halloween breakfast or a late night snack.

Chocolate Pumpkin Witch Cupcakes

Remember back in 2007 when I made witch cupcakes? Didn't think so. Well, I made them again this year, only better:

• Last time, I made a plain chocolate cupcake. This time, I made chocolate pumpkin cupcakes loaded with chocolate chips.
• Last time, I made a funky green meringue frosting. This time, I made a seasonally-spiced buttercream frosting (I still used a little bit of green food coloring on some of them to make them more witchy).
• Last time, I used giant pretzel rods for the broomsticks. This time, I realized (after someone pointed it out) that small pretzel sticks would work much better. I left the chocolate off of the broomsticks this year, though, because I was lazy.
  

For the cookie recipe and assembly instructions, refer to the 2007 post. But, for the new scrumpdidelyicious chocolate pumpkin cupcake recipe, look at the bottom of this post.

First, however, let's see what Bride and Groom 3.0 and roommate Davin thought of the chocolate pumpkin cupcakes. (Note: this video was made before viewing all of your video feedback. There is just one more pre-feedback video after this one, and then they will address your comments. Feel free to keep leaving comments on the videos and they will try to incorporate them whenever possible.)



I should point out that the cookies that they loved (on that hats) are maple or mint cookies. They are store-bought vanilla wafers that I coated in chocolate. I would normally make the wafers myself, but these cupcakes were made in a cupcake class that I taught and we needed to save time.

Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcake Recipe

This recipe should yield about fifteen cupcakes.

• 1 1/2 C flour
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t ginger
• 1/2 t nutmeg
• 1/2 t allspice
• 1 t baking soda
• 1/2 t salt
• 1 1/2 C sugar
• 3/4 C pumpkin puree
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 C vegetable oil
• 1/2 C orange juice
• 4 oz bittersweet chocolate, melted
• 1 1/4 C semisweet chocolate chips

1. Whisk together flour, spices, baking soda, and salt.
2. In a large bowl, combine the sugar, pumpkin, and eggs. Beat until smooth.
3. Mix in the oil, orange juice, and melted chocolate.
4. Slowly add the flour mixture and mix until fully incorporated.
5. Mix in the chocolate chips.
6. Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full.
7. Bake at 350 F for 20-25 minutes.

Pumpkin Pie Spice Frosting

• 1 C unsalted butter, room temperature
• 3 C powdered sugar, sifted
• 4 t vanilla bean paste
• 2 T milk or heavy whipping cream
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t ginger
• 1/2 t nutmeg
• 1/2 t allspice
• Food coloring (optional)

1. Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
2. Mix in vanilla and milk or cream.
3. Mix in spices.
4. Optionally, mix in food coloring to create the color you’d like.

Garlic Cupcakes to Keep You Safe From Vampires This Halloween

On a dark night, just a few days until Halloween, an innocent, unsuspecting cupcake baker sat down to eat her latest creation.

Little did she know that a vampire lurked in the shadows.

The vampire was particularly interested in the cupcake baker, for her blood was extra sweet from eating lots of cupcakes.

The vampire drew closer. The cupcake baker noticed and panicked (but just for a moment).

Suddenly, things went black and white.

But, the cupcake baker had nothing to fear. The cupcake that she was eating was a garlic cupcake and everyone knows that garlic wards off vampires (unless they are Twilight vampires like Edward that you wouldn't want to ward off).

Yes, that's a chocolate covered garlic clove that you see on there.

The vampire dramatically fell to her doom.

Should you want to protect yourself from vampires this Halloween (which I highly recommend), the garlic cupcake recipe is below. While the cupcakes are deathly for the undead, humans are surprisingly fond of them. Several mortals claimed that the combination of flavors (chocolate, coffee, and garlic) actually worked quite well together. "We liked the garlic cupcakes and were surprised to find that a little hint of garlic actually does work with chocolate!" said taster Hao.

The garlic in the cake isn't all that strong, but it does leave you with garlic breath. The garlic in the frosting, however, is quite intense. Jonathan said that the frosting would be great on pasta. I'll post a video review from Bride and Groom 3.0 later in the week (I'm not expecting them to choose this one for their wedding, but you never know).

Garlic Cupcake Recipe

Yield: 18-20 cupcakes

• 2 C flour
• 1 1/2 t baking powder
• 1/2 t baking soda
• 3/4 C unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2/3 C sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2/3 C sour cream
• 4 1/2 oz bittersweet chocolate
• 2/3 C brewed coffee
• 8 cloves roasted garlic (see my post on how to roast garlic, but skip the part about covering it in chocolate)
  

1. Whisk flour, baking powder, and baking soda in a bowl.
2. Beat butter and sugar in a large bowl for 1 minute, until light and fluffy.
3. Beat in eggs and sour cream.
4. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or the microwave.
5. Mix the chocolate into the wet ingredients.
6. Alternately fold in the flour mixture and coffee into the batter.
7. Mash garlic cloves and mix into batter.
   
8. Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full.
   
9. Bake at 350 F for about 25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out of the cupcake clean.

Garlic Coffee Cream Cheese Frosting

• 8 oz cream cheese, room temperature
• 1/4 C unsalted butter, room temperature
• 3 C powdered sugar, sifted
  
• 2 t garlic powder
• 1 t ground coffee

1. Beat cream cheese and butter until smooth.
2. Slowly mix in the powdered sugar.
3. Mix in the garlic powder and ground coffee until integrated.
   

Credits

Special thanks go out to makeup artist Jennifer from Looks by JLW for doing the makeup for this shoot. Our vampire would not have been nearly as spooky without it. Jennifer did an awesome job and, more importantly, she was willing to try the garlic cupcake and even liked it.

Thanks also go out to our vampire, my friend Christina, and, of course, my awesome in-house photographer!

Halloween Snack Idea - Chocolate Covered Garlic

Why?

Last year, Jonathan and I went to Gilroy, California. Gilroy is all about garlic. Each year, they host the Gilroy Garlic Festival - which features, as you might imagine, everything garlic! While we weren't able to make it to the festival, we were able to try some garlic ice cream. It was shockingly tasty and the only ice cream that I've ever eaten that left me with bad breath.

When I was talking about the trip to Groom 1.0, he suggested that I make garlic cupcakes for Halloween to scare off the vampires. I loved the idea! I sent myself a futureme email as a reminder. It's a good thing that I did. I completely forgot about the idea until I received the email a few weeks ago.

I wasn't quite sure how I would make a garlic cupcake, but one thing that I did know was that I would need to use roasted garlic (roasting makes the garlic much sweeter); and, if I were going to roast the garlic, I might as well cover some in chocolate to put on top of the cupcakes.

If you are a garlic lover, then I probably don't need to convince you that eating roasted garlic is a special treat. But, you'll just have to trust me (until you try it yourself) that adding chocolate makes it even better!

How?

I was really excited to find instructions for roasted garlic on Simply Recipes that used a cupcake tin - if it involves my cupcake tin, I can do it! I followed Elise's instructions to a tee, only instead of using olive oil, I used hazelnut oil and a little honey to make the garlic extra sweet. Oh, and I covered mine in chocolate!

• 6 heads of garlic (I only covered some of them in chocolate, I used others in my garlic cupcake recipe)
  
• a few tablespoons of oil (I used hazelnut)
• 1/4 C semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1 T unsalted butter
  

1. Peel away the outer layers of the garlic bulb skin, leaving the skins of the individual cloves intact. Using a knife, cut off 1/4 to a 1/2 inch of the top of cloves, exposing the individual cloves of garlic.
2. Put each garlic head in foil and place them in a cupcake tin, as shown above.
3. Drizzle a couple teaspoons of oil over each head, using your fingers to make sure the garlic head is well coated.
4. Drizzle each head with honey.
5. Close the foil over each head.
   
6. Bake at 400 F for 30-35 minutes, or until the cloves feel soft when pressed.
7. Allow the garlic to cool enough so you can touch it without burning yourself. Use a small knife to cut the skin slightly around each clove. Use a cocktail fork or your fingers to pull or squeeze the roasted garlic cloves out of their skins.
8. Melt the chocolate chips with the butter in a double boiler or the microwave.
9. Dip each clove of garlic in chocolate. I thought it looked best to only cover half of the clove.
10. Place chocolate covered garlic on parchment paper and place in the refrigerator to cool.

Be sure to check out the garlic cupcakes to see just how well these worked at scaring off vampires.

Pumpkin Graham Crackers

These homemade pumpkin graham crackers are not only pumpkin shaped, but also contain pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie spices, giving them a subtle pumpkin flavor.

I made these pumpkin graham crackers in multiple sizes and added some orange sugar to the tiny ones (they were too small for me to give them good faces). Bride 3.0 said that she could "eat 100 of them!" But, she noted that they were a bit Halloweeny for a wedding. Come on - who doesn't want Jack-O-Lanterns at their Spring wedding? :)

The good news is that pumpkin graham crackers can be made in any shape you can cut out. Bride 3.0 suggested hearts.

What to Do With Your Pumpkin Graham Crackers

Aside from simply eating them all up, I have several usage ideas for these pumpkin graham crackers:

• Crumble them to use in the crust for a homemade pumpkin pie.
• Slather them with pumpkin butter or apple butter.
• Put pumpkin ice cream between two of them and freeze for a pumpkin ice cream sandwich.
• Use them to decorate your pumpkin cupcakes.
  

Pumpkin Graham Cracker Recipe

To make these pumpkin graham crackers, I modified my regular graham cracker recipe. I originally got that graham cracker recipe from Free Range Living. She got the recipe from The Fannie Farmer Baking Book.

My modified recipe is below. It makes 36 2 1/2 inch squares. You can do your own math on how many pumpkins that will get you. It obviously depends on the size of your cookie cutters.

• 2 T (1/4 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 2 T pumpkin puree
  
• 1 egg
• 6 T sugar
• 4 T honey (Some graham crackers use half honey and half molasses. You might consider trying that as a variation.)
• 1/2 t baking soda
• 1 t ginger
• 1 t nutmeg
• 1 t cinnamon
• 3/4 t allspice
  
• 2 t water
• 3/4 t salt
• 1 1/2 C graham flour (If you can't get ahold of graham flour, there are plenty of graham cracker recipes that use regular whole wheat flour such as this graham cracker recipe from Baking Bites. You may also be able to directly substitute whole wheat flour in this recipe, but I haven't tested it and I make no promises.)
• 3/4 C all-purpose flour

1. Combine the butter, pumpkin, egg, and sugar in a bowl and beat until smooth and creamy.
2. Stir in the honey.
3. Dissolve the baking soda in the water and add to the butter mixture.
4. Add the salt, graham flour, all-purpose flour, and spices to the mixture and blend thoroughly. The dough should hold together and be manageable. If it is too tacky, add a little more graham flour.
5. Liberally dust a surface with graham flour and roll the dough to a thickness of about 1/8 inch.
   
6. Use your cookie cutters to cut out pumpkins or any other shape.
   
7. Use the tines of a fork to make Jack O' Lantern faces on the pumpkins.
8. Using a spatula, place the pumpkin graham crackers on an ungreased cookie sheet.
9. Bake at 350 F for 15 minutes.
   
10. Remove from the oven and cool on racks. They won't be hard when you first take them out of the oven, but they will harden as they cool.

Easy Halloween Cake

Disclaimer 1: I did not make this easy Halloween cake.
Disclaimer 2: This Halloween cake did not initially look easy to me. However, the baker (Lisa from one of my favorite blogs, My Own Sweet Thyme) said it was not very complicated, and after reading her great step-by-step cake making instructions, I felt like anyone could do it. Regardless of how complicated it is, I'm certainly impressed!

Why am I posting this Halloween cake I didn't make on a cupcake site?

When I made my Halloween cupcakes with edible googly eyes, I promised that anyone who sent me a cupcake they made with edible googly eyes would get featured on Cupcake Project on Halloween.

Lisa was up for the challenge with her Halloween vampire bat cake. The face in the middle is a giant cupcake! She made her googly eyes with cacao nibs for the loose bit and a little piece of an Ooz'n Eyeballz Cherry Candy Ooze bloodshot marshmallow eyeball for the backing.

I love the way it came out!

Happy Halloween to all of you!! I hope that wherever you are, you are not just eating candy, but are chowing down on some spooktacular cupcakes!

Halloween Cupcakes with Edible Googly Eyes

These Halloween cupcakes are not only fun cupcakes for kids to eat on Halloween, they are also fun cupcakes for kids to make.

The key to the Halloween cupcakes is the edible googley eyes. I saw these edible googly eyes almost a year ago on Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and I've been wanting to make them ever since. They are so perfect for Halloween cupcakes!

There are so many creative and scary Halloween cupcake options to make with googley eyes. If you make Halloween cupcakes with googley eyes, send me a photo and/or a link to your blog post by Oct. 30th and I'll do a little roundup on Halloween.

What You'll Need for Halloween Cupcakes:

• Cupcakes to decorate
  
• Powdered Sugar (optional)
• Frosting of your choice in a piping bag or ziplock bag with the corner cut off (you could also use store-bought frosting in a tube).
• Empty gelatin capsules. You would think that a drug store would be the place to find this item - but, no, they can be found at health food and natural food stores. You can also buy gel caps online.
  
• Sprinkles
  
• Gummy candy or tapioca pearls
  

How to Make Halloween Cupcakes

1. If you want the Halloween cupcakes to have a powdered sugar background, start by dusting the whole cupcake with powdered sugar.
2. Next, draw eyes and a mouth with your frosting. You need to frost first or the googly eyes won't stick.
   

3. Open the gel caps and cut them down so that both halves are even or somewhat even (you know I'm not a perfectionist). Some of them cracked in the cutting process. I didn't worry much about that - no one could tell.
4. Fill the gel caps with a single sprinkle or use your imagination to come up with something else that looks like an eyeball. Round sprinkles might have been better than the ones I used, but I didn't have any on hand.
   

5. To complete your googly eye, stick the gel cap with sprinkles inside onto something colorful and gummy. The green behind the eyes in this picture is a colored tapioca pearl cut in half. Since this isn't a common household item, you could do the exact same thing with any kind of gummy candy.
6. Stick your googly eyes onto the frosting.
   

More Halloween Cupcakes

Check out these witchy Halloween cupcakes!

Halloween Cupcake Idea

Halloween Cupcakes

Read on to learn about how to make witch Halloween cupcakes or learn how to make Halloween cupcakes with edible googly eyes!

How to Make Witch Halloween Cupcakes

I got the general Halloween cupcake concept from the Food Network - but I didn't use any of these recipes and they didn't have a broom.

The beauty of these Halloween cupcakes is that the flavor really doesn't matter. You can make Halloween cupcakes with any of your favorite cake recipes and cookie recipes (for the brooms and hats). You could even (and I can't believe I'm saying this) use a mix. You would still get rave reviews.

However, for the curious, I am listing below the exact recipes that I used.

The Halloween Cake Recipe

For the cake, I made a chocolate cake that I found on Vanilla Garlic. I mixed in Rice Krispies to make it reminiscent of Nestle Crunch bars, my favorite Halloween candy when I was a kid. The chocolate cupcakes were moist and tasty. The Krispies didn't add much. Most tasters didn't even detect that they were there, except for the two mentioned above who thought they were dried fruit.

The Spooky Green Halloween Frosting

I wanted to make green witch faces for the icing and from past experience I knew that most of my tasters had a problem with green. I know that people tend to like green apple candy so I decided that if I made my frosting apple-flavored, people wouldn't mind if I colored it green. I used a recipe from C&H Sugar. It had a very mild apple flavor. It was super light and fluffy and most of my tasters really liked it.

Edible Halloween Witches Brooms

I got the broom idea from Diana's Desserts. However, instead of using her cookie recipe, I used some leftover maple cookie dough I had in the freezer. It worked perfectly, but probably wasn't as tasty as if I had made the dough fresh.

Edible Halloween Witches Hats

I made the hats from the same cookie dough. I baked up some small flat circle cookies. When they were out of the oven, I brushed melted chocolate mixed with butter on top of each cookie and used the hot chocolate to glue a Hershey's kiss to the center of each cookie.

The easier version of this, which I saw all over the web, was to make these with the back of a Fudge Stripe Cookie. I haven't had a Fudge Stripe cookie in years. We used to keep these around the house when I was growing up. My mom let me have two per day. I would allot them to myself when I finished my homework as a self-reward. I don't think I ever cheated and had more than two. I think I was an unusual child.

Anyway, Fudge Stripes would definitely not be a bad witch hat option in a pinch.

Why I Made These Halloween Cupcakes

Halloween is your opportunity to be someone or something different. Women, at least those I encounter in St. Louis, typically take the opportunity to be sluts. Do we all secretly want to be sluts? I didn't think I did. A few years back, I dressed as a bagel for Halloween. Yes, a bagel, complete with sesame seeds. My costume was so big that I could barely fit in the door at the party I was attending, let alone get close enough to talk to someone without yelling. It didn't even matter that I was there with my boyfriend (now husband). I felt like, well, some day-old bread. The next year I wore something slutty. Single women: Do not be bagels.

My cupcakes also wanted to dress up for Halloween. They are still young (it's only my 1st year of cupcake making) so they decided to go for cute, not slutty, and be witches. Unlike every other cupcake I have made, it didn't matter what was inside these cupcakes, they just needed to be costumed appropriately. When my friends asked what kind of cupcakes these were, I replied that they were made of 100% witch.

Footnotes

1. As my obsession with cupcakes has grown, so has my husband's interest in and skill at food photography. Most of the pictures on this site have been taken by him. For the shot at the top of this post, he created a special hood for the camera which made any bright light look like a cupcake. The cupcake stars in the picture were created due to the hood not to editing in Photoshop.

2. I'm again participating in the St. Louis Bloggers' Blog Carnival. This is my entry.