Spider Cupcakes

This may be a bit late for Halloween - it's still the 31st here, so maybe just in time! Halloween's not a huge thing here in Hong Kong - I've never even dressed up before for Halloween! Usually my friends and I would go to the annual Halloween Bash at Ocean Park (a theme park), but this year we're just all too busy, so I baked a batch of Spider Cupcakes to mark the occasion.

Of course, the last thing I'd like to dress up as, or see during Halloween are spiders. But I wouldn't mind having a spider morphed from a chocolate cupcake, with a generous slather of chocolate frosting, and sprinkled with more chocolate. I think they look cute, no?

The chocolate cupcake recipe I used was from Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours, and the idea for decorations were from Bakerella. I was a bit disappointed with the cupcake because the crumb was very loose and the chocolate flavour was not deep enough. I defiantly going to stick to my favourite chocolate cupcake recipe in the future. The glaze, however, was nice and hassle-free to make. Made up of simply 3 ingredients - melted chocolate, butter and icing sugar - it tasted wonderful and had a lovely sheen to it.
To transform the cupcakes into scary, chilling arthropods, I used chocolate shavings or Varlhona crunchy pearls as the 'exo-skeleton', strawberry licorice for the legs and M&Ms for the eyes. I know that the heart-studded cupcake liners are hardly Halloween-ish, but that's all I had at home!

So after the transformation, I preserved them in a box in the fridge over night, and bought them to school for my friends to catch and devour. (In fact, some of my friends actually ate REAL spiders in Cambodia during Challenge Week! Cool, right?)

And finally as a Biology student, I do actually know that spiders have 8 legs (...but not without asking a friend first!), but I couldn't fit on 4 pairs - so theoretically all my spiders were disabled spiders!

I'm amazed by some of the Halloween creations other food bloggers have created. Here are some of my favourites: Brain Clot Cupcakes from Annie's Eats, Sugar Cookies from Sweetopia and Coffin Cookeis from Bake at 350. I'd love to try out some of those next year!

Here's me being a 'ghost', taken by myself using the self timer on my camera. If you're out for Halloween, it'd be something fun to do! Check out Photojojo for the tutorial. Aaand, Happy Halloween to you all!

(I'm not writing this post at home, so I do not have the cookbook with me - I'll update the recipe later. If you would like to see my favourite chocolate cupcake recipe, see my old post.)