Spooky halloween baking inspiration!

Yes its nearly upon us – the most wonderful time of the year – Halloween!

Actually I don’t think Halloween is THE most wonderful time of the year (Christmas definitely holds the top spot in my heart!) but Halloween is definitely a close second. True story – I spent many of my teenage Halloweens decorating our family home with Halloween decorations and making and icing intricate Halloween cookies and cupcakes only for my efforts to be spectacularly wasted on the 3 trick or treaters we’d get each year.

That hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for Halloween baking though, and I’ll be making Halloween cupcakes this year for my friends and for the October Cake Eaters Anonymous event. So as well as telling you guys what I’m thinking of for my spooky cupcakes, I thought I’d share some spooky Halloween baking inspiration from around the world.

Ghost cupcakes

These ghost cupcakes by Kirbie Cravings are so cute! The ghosts are made from meringue and look very realistic, and I like how there isn’t too much frosting on them. Click here to find out how to make them!

Wiggly worm crunch

This recipe using rice crispies would be fantastic to make with kids – its really simple and I’m sure the idea of eating worms would completely captivate most young kids! This is a much easier Halloween option than most of the alternatives, you don’t even have to turn the oven on! Click here to find out how to make it.

Halloween cookies

You can definitely get Halloween cookie cutters in the UK (try eBay, and I think I got mine from Birthdays) – I have a cat, bat, ghost, pumpkin and a few other Halloween related things . These would be a pretty easy Halloween option – you could just add red eyes on the bat and black whiskers on the cat using writing icing. If you wanted to go to more effort, you could use icing to completely decorate the cookies like this, but I think they look pretty cool as they are. Click here for the recipe!

Pumpkin whoopie pies

Whoopie pies are really popular and its incredibly easy to give them a Halloween twist with a orange-tinted pumpkin filling. If you can’t find canned pumpkin (you can find it at Waitrose and online) then you could just make a plain filling which you colour orange (or you could even flavour it orange too!). Click here to see how to make them.

Halloween Cake Pops

If your baking skills are like, totally AMAZING, and you have a lot of time on your hands, these Halloween cake pops obviously look incredibly impressive. They take more work and effort than the other options but if you wanted to do something amazing for a Halloween event, they would totally rock. I certainly wouldn’t hand them out to trick-or-treaters though, they can be ungrateful little bastards! As you may recall, I once tried to make cake pops and it all went very wrong, so I can only marvel at Bakerella’s ability to produce all these fantastic little treats! Click here to find out how to make them.

As for me, I will be making Halloween cupcakes  using a chocolate cupcake, with a small cavity filled with caramel (similar to the cookie dough in my Chocolate Chip Cookie dough cupcakes!) and then frosted with bright orange frosting (spiked with a little caramel) with Halloween sprinkles and a caramel drizzle on top! Hopefully they will turn out similar (in colour) to the above picture. I’m hoping they go down well at the October Cake Eaters Anonymous event which is being held on October 30th!

Are you a Halloween fan? Will you be doing any Halloween baking this year – and if so will it be for your benefit or for your trick-or-treaters?