Halloween Cupcake Stand

We had dinner guests last night and I made some festive cupcakes for desert. I thought I would share how easy it is to make a cheap cupcake stand and how to make professional looking cupcakes without any cake decorating experience. This is very simple to make for a Halloween party.

                                       

**click on any of the photos to enlarge**

To learn how to make the cupcake stand, read my post here. 

My cupcake stand was still decorated from Ethan's first birthday so I stripped off the paper and the ribbon that I had glued to the center and edges shown on my original post. It came off really easy.

Next, I wrapped colored scrapbook paper around the two middle styrofoam blocks. You could use some really cute Halloween print scrapbook paper, but I just used what I had on hand.




 
Then I used craft glue to attach ribbon around the edges of the foam board. I used a wide black ribbon for the bottom, a cute halloween print for the middle and a smaller width black ribbon for the top. I took this picture right after I glued the ribbon so the glue is still showing white. It dries clear so you won't see it.

I think it turned out cute! Now onto the cupcakes! My favorite chocolate cupcake recipe is Martha Stewarts One-Bowl Chocolate Cupcakes. Since there was just 5 of us I halved the recipe and it turned out perfect with 1 even dozen. 

Next was to make the buttercream icing. Consistency is pretty important when it comes to decorating. You don't want it too runny where it can't hold it's shape, but you also don't want it too stiff or you won't be able to squeeze it out of the decorating bag. A great recipe to follow is Wilton's Buttercream recipe. This is the right amount for one dozen cupcakes since I tend to have a lot of icing on my cupcakes.

After you whip up your icing figure out if you want all chocolate or colored icing or half and half. For this batch I made half chocolate and half orange colored. Add about 1/4 cup of cocoa to make chocolate icing. If  it's too stiff you can always add a tad bit of milk. Great thing about icing is that you can always adjust by just adding either milk or more powdered sugar. For colored icing I use Wiltons Icing Colors. Add a small bit at a time until you get your desired color.

You will need to buy some plastic disposable decorating bags or you can just use a ziplock bag. I used 2 different types of decorating tips here, the 1M and 4B. Since these tips are so large you don't need a coupler to attach it to the decorating bag.

Slide the tip down to the end of the bag and snip off the end of the bag like so.


Place your decorating bags into a glass while you fill them with your icing. Fill bags about half way and then twist the top so your icing doesn't squirt out the top of the bag.



You are ready to decorate! Here is step by step photos of how you do a 'swirl' onto a cupcake.

Have fun with it, and if you don't like it you can always scrap it off and start over :-)

Here is my finished cupcake stand! I used Wilton Halloween Sprinkles and also some sprinkles I found on the $1 aisle at Target. There are lots of cute cupcake liners, sprinkles and toppers out there for Halloween so be creative. The orange icing is piped in the 1M tip and the chocolate is piped in 4B. All of the cake decorating supplies can be purchased at your local Michael's or local cake supply store.

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