HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!

Happy Halloween everyone!!!

Here's to a celebratory post in honor of the ghoulish holiday!

So as you all know in my earlier posts, I wanted to make some really special and festive cupcakes for Halloween.  I really like getting into the holidays, so I tried to make this one REALLY fun!

I finally made a decision on which cupcakes to make for the occasion and they turned out to be the Jack Skellington cupcakes.  I started with a fairly simple semi-homemade recipe for my favorite cupcakes: Chocolate Velvet.  It's a recipe that I found months ago on the Betty Crocker website, and I just can not stop making them!  They are so moist, and chocolatey and delicious that everytime I make them, I can't stop eating them! (Bad habit, I know.)

The recipe starts out with a box of Betty Crocker Devil's Food cake mix that I got at Wal-Mart.

Once all of your ingredients are in (except the chocolate chips) mix them together on high.  It should look like this...

Next mix in the chocolate chips.  Make sure to stir them in not beat them in with the mixer.  I used Hershey's Semi-sweet Chocolate chips, available at Wal-Mart or any other grocer:

Divide them [as] evenly [as you can get them] into the baking cups:

Now bake...and wait...

and wait....

and wait........

but only for 24 mins though!

Ready..... DONE!

Now for the frosting...

The frosting is a homemade white chocolate frosting.  I found the recipe on Cook's.com  I added way more powdered sugar than the recipe called for (approx. 24 oz. instead of 1 cup) because the frosting kept tasting too buttery and wouldn't stiffen or fluff up.  I found the Baker's chocolate on sale at Wal-Mart and it comes in 6-1 oz. blocks so it was perfect for the recipe (I really don't like left over ingredients).

It comes in little squares and you need to chop it up for this recipe.

Then frost the cupcakes:

Pre-face:

Face added!

YUMMY IN THE TUMMY!!!

Jack Skellington...

Of course everyone knows who Jack Skellington is, right?  Oh, you don't?  Let me give you a refresher course...

Tall, slinky, skeletal man.
Charming and charismatic.
Dead.

Oh, just forget it! You'll know him if you see him.  But you don't really want to see him...not in real life anyway.

Well what better way to celebrate Halloween with one of the scariest looking faces in TV?!  Jack Skellington is probably one of the easiest and most fun designs to make on a cupcake!  It's a no brainer! =)

I found cute ones on Pintrest and I just had to click through to see where I could find a recipe.

This recipe is BORING! (no offense to the persons that made this cupcake recipe) But I mean, seriously?  Who wants same old, boring old, chocolate cupcakes with white buttercream?!  I know it's an oldie but goodie but let's be serious here...This is Halloween!  We need to spice it up a little!  I was thinking a dark chocolate or devil's food cupcake with a white chocolate frosting.

What are your favorite black/white cupcake combos?

Halloween Cupcakes

So I have been on a quest all week (okay, the last two days) to make a super awesome cupcake(s) to top my Halloween cupcakes from last year.  Last year, I made Pumpkin Spice cupcakes (which also made a reappearance at Thanksgiving) with canned pumpkin, and Monster cupcakes with molten chocolate middles.

This year, I have been on Pintrest quite a bit and have found a new challenge: Zombie Cupcakes.  These cupcakes were inspired by a t-shirt called "The Last Cupcake Standing."

They are super cute and look like so much fun to make! I have hit a few bumps in the road though.  I can't figure out what I want to do for the outsides so that I can make the cupcakes look like zombies.  I went to Bake it Pretty and found these super cute treat tubs, but they don't hold up very well in the oven and are a bigger than the standard size cupcakes.

I have two other alternatives. One, would be to bake the cupcakes in the portion cups offered by BIP, but, they only come in polka dots or stripes. The other alternative would be to bake the cupcakes in standard white or lime green baking cups, but I still think they would be too small for the treat tubs so I would still need to figure out how to wrap them so that they are still following the zombie theme.

Any ideas?