Monster cupcakes

Turn ordinary vanilla cupcakes into these scary monster cakes for Halloween! The kids will love helping decorate them and you can have fun with different coloured icing and different eyes. I used sugar paste for the eyes but you could use mini marshmallows or chocolate buttons and add some sweets such as strawberry laces for messy monster hair.

I started off by baking basic vanilla cupcakes and left them to cool while I made the vanilla buttercream. When my buttercream was a smooth consistency I added a half a teaspoon of blue food colouring (paste not liquid) and then mixed the colour into the buttercream. I added a bit more blue paste a little at a time and beat after each addition until I was happy that the colour was bright enough.

I used my new OXO Good Grips Bakers 4 piece decorating kit to pipe the buttercream, it was the first time I had used it but I found it really easy to use. You simply unscrew the white collar from the silicone bottle, fill the bottle with icing then screw the collar back on. I used the closed star nozzle (1 of 4 nozzles included in the set) to pipe my monster's furry faces and also tried out the other nozzles which are really easy to change over even with buttercream still in the silicone bottle. The bottle also turns inside out so it's very easy to clean when you have finished piping.

I held the piping bottle vertically and squeezed the icing out into a small stars until the cake was covered. For the eyes, I rolled some white sugar paste into balls and made smaller balls from black sugar paste. Using a dab of water I stuck the black icing on to the white 'eyeballs' then once dry my children had fun creating the monster faces. You could add all sorts to the cakes to make them scarier, add other features such as noses or teeth or do a mixture of icing colours to make a scary family of monster cakes for Halloween.