Halloween spiders

I spent the weekend in South Carolina with my aunt, uncle, 14-year-old cousin, and 12-year-old cousin. Let me just say, if I haven't already in this blog, that my cousins are a lot younger than I am, but they're taller than I am! This makes me SO jealous. I wish I was tall.

Anyway, my cousins are cheerleaders for their middle school and had a cheerleading competition this weekend, so we wanted to make cupcakes for their squad. Since it's almost Halloween, we chose to make spiders! My aunt and I went to a bunch of different stores to make sure we got everything we would need for the cupcakes. I couldn't bring my entire kitchen with me on the 7-hour drive to visit them, so we had to buy a lot of stuff.

After we FINALLY found everything, we got to work! I started by making frosting and custard filling prior to the girls getting home from school, so that they could help with the decorating of the cupcakes. I made vanilla buttercream frosting and I dyed half of the batch a grayish-black color for the bodies of the spiders with Wilton Icing Color in black. I then made a pumpkin spice custard for the filling with Jell-o Instant Pumpkin Spice pudding  and light whipped cream. If you like pumpkin spice pudding, go to your nearest grocery store and buy as much as possible because it's only available during the Halloween/Thanksgiving season and it is DELICIOUS.

The girls and I made two-dozen French vanilla cupcakes and two-dozen chocolate cupcakes. We cored the cupcakes after they cooled and I showed Leah how to pipe the filling inside the cupcakes. Then we started frosting them. Leah and Carsyn put the eyes and legs on the two-dozen spiders, and then we frosted the other two-dozen with white buttercream and topped them with orange and black sugar sprinkles.

On Saturday, after my aunt and I ran in the Color Me Rad 5k, we had to scrub all of the color off of us and then she, my uncle, and I hopped in the car and made the 1.5-hour drive to the cheerleading competition to watch the girls. After they competed, the parents of the cheerleaders had this whole meal thing set up for them in the parking lot. I don't think these girls know how lucky they are! When I cheered, we never had something so nice. We ate concession stand food or waited till after the whole thing was over to go out to eat. I hope these girls appreciate how amazing all of their parents are to do such a nice thing for them.

Oh, and their team won first place in their division! They did GREAT! I'm proud of my cousins, as well as their entire team. :o)

BOO! It's almost Halloween!

I wanted to try out a new recipe for Halloween/Fall and I thought I'd make the cupcakes in a Halloween theme! The ghosts are made with marshmallow fondant and I used Wilton Edible Color Markers to draw the faces on them. The others I am calling "witchy gnomes" because I wanted to make witch hats, but I got another idea after I was making the hats. They're made from sugar cones, melted chocolate, and edible eyes.

These cupcakes are vanilla pumpkin cupcakes with pumpkin spice and cinnamon buttercream frosting. They're an interesting recipe that calls for sour cream! They're delicious though. :o)