Although the main focus of Halloween is the important task of warding off evil spirits, we all know that its real purpose is to dress up and eat silly amounts of sweets. And biscuits. And, of course, cakes. I had a real trick up my sleeve for this year, thanks to my shiny new cupcake book; super spooky, frighteningly fearsome, eerily enticing ghost cupcakes!
I used the Hummingbird Bakery’s chocolate cupcake recipe, purely because this makes the richest and most mouthwateringly moist cupcakes known to man. In order to make six ghosts, I made twelve large cupcakes and five smaller ones; this slightly strange numbering came about because, despite my pleading and coaxing, the mixture stubbornly refused to make one more small cupcake. While I waited for them to cool down completely, I mixed up a quarter of the usual amount of the Hummingbird Bakery’s vanilla icing, adding a few drops of green food colouring for a Halloween effect.
Then came the construction. Using one of the large cupcakes that had behaved itself and stayed in its case, I smoothed a layer of icing thick enough to act as glue on the top. After taking one of the naughtier large cupcakes out of its wrapper, I placed this upside down on the icing. I put another layer of icing on the upside down cupcake and placed small cupcake, also upside down, on the top. I then cut a small slice from my block of readymade fondant icing and rolled it out between two sheets of clingfilm until it vaguely resembled a sheet. Although my Love Food: The Cupcake book suggested smearing icing all over the tower of chocolate cake goodness, I felt this was a bit risky, so I draped the sheet over the tower, and pinched it together slightly to give it more shape. Using melted chocolate, I carefully drew two eyes and a wiggly mouth on each sheet.
The ghosts did not look particularly scary, but then again it is quite difficult to make something formed mostly of sugar and chocolate look more blood curdling than cuddly. They were not perfect; a few people thought that the mouths were moustaches, and some of them – the cakes – were rather oddly-shaped. Still, they were sweet spectres, and devilishly tasty at that.
