Vampire Cupcakes

In a slight change from crafting, I have been doing some experimental cake baking. I love baking cakes and after a disastrous first cake made without help (during which I burnt my arm resulting in a permanent scar!) I have got pretty good at it. Decorating them on the other hand is not my strong point.

So I was recently given a book of cake decorating ideas called A Zombie ate my Cupcake by Lilli Vanilli, which, as the name suggests, has lots of gory/halloweeny ideas for the good old cupcake.

I decided to have a go at the vampire bite cupcake as it seemed to be one of the simpler decorations in the book, and didn't require too many ingredients that I didn't already have in my cake making stash.

Step one was to make the red velvet cupcakes, which are essentially vanilla cupcakes with added red colouring (4 table spoons worth in fact!)

As an early halloween treat I bought some orange and black silicone cake cases (fromSainsbury's if you were wondering), which were perfect for this. I get on much better with silicone cases, theres no fiddling about with paper cases, you dont need a separate case to hold the cupcake in place and theres no rubbish. Perfect.

Once the cakes were done it was on to the cream cheese frosting. Following the recipe, it seemed a bit too creamy, so i added a bit more icing sugar to mine.

Next I had to make the cherry sauce for the blood. This seemed a lot simpler in the instructions than it actually was and I ended up spending over an hour trying to get it right!

Task 1 was to blend the cherries with a hand blender. My blender wasn't up to the job and didn't chop up the cherries as much as was needed, which made life much harder later on.

After boiling the cherry mixture it looked more like jam than sauce, and I had to add water to make it even vaguely pipe-able. The lumps of cherry kept getting stuck in the nozzle of the piping bag which meant everything got sticky and the delicate blood drip effect I was going for turned into more splatters of gore.

But I got there. Some of the cakes worked perfectly and kind of resemble the illustartion in the book:
Others, not so much, but they almost worked (and they tasted good!) so thats a start. May be a while before I attempt any of the more complex decorations but I'm still impressed with my progress!