Halloween Treats

As you know, the teddy bears have already made their Hallowe'en decorations for this year (read about them making pumpkin lanterns here). Now they are busy making nice (but scary) food for a Hallowe'en party. They decided that cupcakes would be quite easy to make - they have made them before - but this time the decoration on them would be a little different.

They all got together to decide how they wanted to ice their cupcakes, and who should be in charge of which task. Boo wanted the cupcakes to be shaped like witches hats, but that seemed a bit complicated. James wondered if they could have broomsticks on them. Again, that seemed a bit too difficult.

In the end they settled on a couple of different ideas. Richard thought that he could ice the tops of the cupcakes so that they looked like spiders' webs. And Custard said he could make the cupcakes look like spiders! Everybody thought that would be scary enough for Hallowe'en!

First of all they had to make the cupcakes. They found a recipe they had used before and Teddy and Charlie offered to do the baking, with Scary supervising. That's Scary the teddy bear, not scary as in Hallowe'en!

They found all the necessary ingredients and then followed the recipe to mix them up together. They used the food mixer because teddy bears' arms aren't really strong enough to whip together the butter and sugar fast enough, and their paws are too soft to hold the wooden spoons easily, so they left all that hard work to the electric mixer. Once the mixture was ready, Elizabeth and Custard placed paper cake cases into the bun tray - they would make 12 cupcakes in all.

Then Richard and Custard started planning their toppings. Richard made some white icing, which he separated into two bowls, and Custard then used food colouring to make one portion as black as he could. It took quite a lot of testing and trialling using the three primary colours he had available, but he found that a combination of mostly blue and a little bit of yellow (which made a dark green) plus some red made an effective dark colour, almost black.

Then Richard made some grey buttercream, just ordinary buttercream but with a little bit of Custard's 'black' icing added to it. He also found some liquorice, in the shape of Catherine wheels, which he proceeded to cut up into shorter lengths. They remained quite curly though.

Richard covered some of the cupcakes with his white icing, and then very carefully piped some circles of black icing over the top, like a target. Then he used a toothpick to gently score through the icing from the centre of the cupcake down to the edge of the paper case. When he had finished, the icing looked like a spider's web! How clever!

Custard covered one or two of the cupcakes with the remainder of Richard's black icing, keeping a tiny bit back for his spiders. Some he left bare. Then Richard used a piping nozzle to make twirly spiders' bodies on top of each cake. Custard stuck one end of each of the liquorice pieces into this 'body' and the liquorice naturally curved up and over the cupcake case, making the spider look very realistic. Once Custard had piped 'eyes' onto the cupcakes using the last of the black icing, they looked extra scary!

When they had used up all the liquorice, Richard piped the buttercream in spirals onto the top of the remaining cupcakes. Then came the best bit! Richard got to lick out the bowl the buttercream had been mixed in - so good!!

They showed the rest of the bears what they had been up to, and the other bears were very impressed and instantly wanted to try them! If you would like to try making scary cupcakes, you can find the recipe the bears used by clicking here. See if you can make your cakes look like spiders and spiders' webs too! Enjoy!