Halloween Spiderweb Cupcakes

We were having a few friends over for Halloween night to have dinner prior to going out trick or treating so I wanted to make a fun dessert.  It's not that you need MORE sweets on Halloween, but I have been wanting to try piping chocolate decorations and thought I'd give this a try for the occasion. 

I made a different chocolate cupcake recipe that I found by Ina Garten as I wanted to do a glossy ganache on top. It was definitely a different cake recipe that called for no leavening or cocoa but Hershey's chocolate syrup instead? I was skeptical but gave it a try. They baked nicely and they were definitely more dense, but it was perfect to hold the ganache frosting and it didn't soak through after we dipped the tops in the glossy chocolate and heavy cream mixture. 

It was SO fun piping the white chocolate! I melted down Ghiradelli chocolate disks and put it in a quart size bag with the corner snipped off to make a piping bag. It worked well, but you need to work quickly before the white chocolate starts to solidify in the bag. 

I used a template for the spiderwebs that I found online and piped along the lines on wax paper.  I placed the cobwebs in the freezer to harden and continued with piping. I bought a bag of plastic spiders and decorated each one with a spider. 

I even had a little extra white chocolate so I tried my hand at piping a short "Boo!" on a few. 

They were a hit for dinner and enjoyed after a long walk around Georgetown for trick or treating. Happy Halloween! 

Chocolate Cream Cheese Cupcakes

My mum has made these yummy cupcakes since I was little. It was always a favorite at school birthday celebrations or as a treat at home. 

I'm not the biggest fan of chocolate cake, but these...these cupcakes with the airy chocolate cake and the big glop of cream cheese in the center.  These are amazing. 

I made the chocolate cake batter first and put it in the cupcake papers, then mixed up the cream cheese filling to drop into each cupcake.  These are the ultimate creamy filled cupcakes without having to inject the filling. 

I dropped a heaping tablespoon of the cream cheese-chocolate chip mixture in each one and they are ready to bake.  

Here they are prefectly baked and ready to enjoy. 

The beautiful thing about putting chocolate chips into the cream cheese is that you end up with melted chcolate inside cream cheese INSIDE chocolate cake!  They are especially amazing when they're warm with a nice cold cup of milk. 

Ingredients:

Chocolate cake:

1 C. sugar

1 1/2 C. flour

1/4 C. cocoa

1 t. salt

1t. baking soda

1/2 c. oil

1 T. vinegar (white or apple cider)

1 t. vanilla

Cream cheese filling:

One 8 ox. package of cream cheese

1 egg, slightly beaten

1/3 C. sugar

1 pinch salt

6 oz. chocolate chips

Directions:

Cake: Mix all ingredients well and fill cupcake papers 1/3 to 1/2 full with the cake mixture.

Filling: In a small bowl, combine the cream cheese, egg, sugar and salt. Add the chocolate chips and mix together. 

Drop a large spoonful of the cream cheese-chocolate chip mixture on top of each cupcake in the raw batter.

Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes or until firm. 

Mummy Cupcakes

I haven't done many fun baking projects lately and it had been a while since I had whipped together some buttercream and played with fondant. So, I became a bit inspired over the pre-Halloween weekend.  Last year, I made ghost cupcakes for a friend's halloween party. This year, I thought I'd try these mummy cupcakes.

 I made white chocolate fondant again. While it was pretty simple to knead it together and roll it out, the time intensive part was in cutting all the "bandage" strips and making the mummy faces. 

I made devil's food chocolate cupcakes, vanilla buttercream for the base, some candy eyes and then all the cute little white chocolate bandage strips to make the mummy faces.

They don't look very scary at all, but they're fun to unravel and eat.

Pudding Filled Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes a while ago and just didn't think they were quite worthy of blogging about.  Not that anything I make is a pastry masterpiece, but some turn out better than others.  These tasted really good (or so the kids told us), but I wasn't as happy with the ganache topping or the writing I attempted to do on them.  They are my modern take on the Hostess cupcake.  I haven't made many filled cupcakes, so I thought I'd try.  I wanted to take some treats in for little A's last day at her cousin's school.  My original thought was to do writing on the top saying "Bye" and "Farewell" and so on. But, the white chocolate writing pen I had didn't work out as easily as I'd though.  So, we ended up with some messy squigglies resembling the Hostess cupcakes of our childhood.

They were yummy chocolate cupcakes made from Martha Stewart's one bowl chocolate cupcake recipe.

With some of them, we hollowed out the center with this special cupcake gutting tool.  The others, we simply injected them with the pudding filling.  I used an instant vanilla pudding mixture for something more moist vs. using buttercream.

Instead of frosting the cupcakes, the glaze looked so nice and good for writing on (had it worked out better), but I didn't follow the instructions thoroughly and used less heavy cream since it looked too thin.  I think it would have been even more smooth and easy to glaze if I'd used the correct amount. They still looked alright and most importantly they tasted good still.

So chocolaty and shiny!

The centers had a nice amount of pudding in them!

Here is my attempt at the Hostess squigglies.  Not too bad, but not the beautiful cursive white chocolate messages that I had imagined.