Naturally Green St. Patrick's Day Cupcakes

Having a sensitivity to food coloring confuses people sometimes, especially since mine is restricted to blue. What they don't seem to understand is that my body doesn't actually care if it looks blue, just if it contains the pigment Blue 1. You know what else contains Blue 1 besides blue food coloring? Green food coloring. Purple food coloring. A variety of foods that don't fall anywhere on the blue side of the color wheel, also known as my list of reasons I hate everything (because I usually discover these foods contain blue food coloring the hard way).

Reasons I Hate Everything List

• Store bought marshmallows (even the gingerbread ones)
• Cranberry ginger ale (ironically bought to make my stomach feel better)
• Chocolate animal crackers
• Peach Mango Crystal Lite
• Reese's Pieces
• Almost anything berry flavored

There's probably more, but since I've become obsessive about checking the ingredients on foods before I buy them, there's a lot less accidental blue food coloring ingestion, so I'm less angry about it. That's not to say I never slip up (sometimes on purpose, damn you sour gummy worms), but since my system has usually been cleaned out of all blue by that time, it's usually less "I hate everything" and more "well, that was not smart."

But when this time of year rolls around, and everyone decides to dye everything green, the subject starts to come up again. Well I tell someone I can't eat something that has green food coloring, they go, "Why, it's not blue," and I have to go back to the elementary school color wheel to explain how you make something green.

Enter the naturally green cupcakes. I originally made them last year for a friend who wanted "baby friendly" St. Patrick's Day cupcakes for her son's day care. I didn't know what baby friendly cupcakes meant, so I figured I'd just make something low sugar with no artificial ingredients and some hidden healthy stuff. (I topped those original cupcakes with an avocado cream cheese frosting, which made me sad because avocado+cream cheese tasted really good and all I wanted to do was add some garlic and onion to it and spread it on toast. Instead I, very reluctantly, had to add sugar)

I had low expectations for those cupcakes, as they were meant for tiny people who hadn't yet grown all of their teeth, but they were surprisingly tasty. I decided to try and make them again for Christmas, tweaking the recipe up a bit for adults, and topping them with some red velvet frosting. Those were really good, but I decided to make the full recipe in the blender, and the flour got overworked, so they came out a bit on the gummy side (which was also sad, because making them in the blender was so easy!)

So here we've come full circle and I decided to once again, this time with the tweaked recipe and without trying to make everything in the blender. Whattaya think?

Green enough for you? Except for the candy decorations, there is not a drop of food coloring in these bad boys. Have you guessed what makes that possible yet?

The answer is spinach. These cupcakes are loaded up with some green leafy goodness adding color and nutrition without tasting like it. While the cupcakes do have a different flavor than a straight up vanilla cupcake would, nobody can tell you made them with spinach unless you tell them. Plus, they're a lot healthier than a regular cupcake. You've got spinach, you've also got unsweetened applesauce, and there's only one stick of butter for the whole batch. It's practically health food. I've totally eaten these for breakfast and not felt one whit of guilt.

Of course, I've also eaten pie for breakfast and not felt guilty about it, so I may not be the best judge of food related guilt.

These cupcakes are a little more dense and a little more coarse than the ideal cake texture would be. You could skip the frosting and call them muffins, but then you don't get the moral superiority of eating spinach for dessert, and I'm not down with that.

As for the toppings, those are not healthy, but that's the part that makes them cupcakes.

The frosting is a cream cheese frosting, and it wasn't half bad, considering I'm not a huge fan of cream cheese frosting, but it refused to stiffen. I have never made a cream cheese frosting that stiffened properly. I don't know if it's because I purposefully use less powdered sugar than most recipes (most cream cheese frosting recipes are way too sweet.Tooth-achingly so. I don't think I will ever understand), but it never happens for me.

Decorations wise, I went super simple. I separated out the yellow M&Ms from a bag of spring colored ones (spring yellow is paler, but there's more per bag), and placed them on top to look like gold coins. Then I sprinkled some rainbow-colored Nerds around the edges to represent a rainbow. You could totally use rainbow sprinkles instead; that was actually my plan, but I saw the rainbow Nerds in the grocery store and I got excited. XD

I realized afterwards that using neon-colored candies to decorate my naturally colored cupcakes was a bit contradictory, but they're pretty so I don't care. (I actually didn't end up eating any of the decorated ones, so it all worked out in the end)

Spinach Cupcakes
Yield: 18

Ingredients
5 cups packed fresh spinach
1 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar*
2 eggs
1 tbsp. vanilla extract
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
Cream cheese frosting

Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Add the spinach, maple syrup, applesauce, and vinegar to a blender and blend until completely smooth.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar together on medium speed for about 5 minutes, or until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, until well incorporated. Add the vanilla.

In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and salt. Add about half the flour mixture to the butter, beating on low until just combined. Add half the spinach mixture and continue to mix, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add the remaining flour and spinach mix, and beat on low speed until well combined.

Line a muffin tin with paper liners and fill three quarters of the way with batter. Bake 18-20 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool completely on wire racks before frosting.

*I have skipped the sugar before with no ill results, besides being not quite sweet enough, so if you prefer to not use refined sugar, you can leave it out.

Recipe by Kim

The Longest Journey Balance Cupcakes

Hot Chocolate and Chai Tea Cupcakes with Chai Spiced Buttercream

Do you guys know what my favorite video game of all time is? Probably not, because I've never talked about it on the blog (although I have talked about one of its sequels), and I don't think you're psychic. I'm not even sure that you'd be able to guess, as it's pretty old now and a bit on the obscure side.

That game is The Longest Journey. It's one of those old point and click adventure games that used to be all the rage in the 90s where gameplay was focused on puzzle solving rather than killing all the things. In fact, The Longest Journey is best known for one of it's puzzles. All you have to do is mention "the rubber ducky puzzle" and anyone who has played the game will know exactly what you're talking about.

Source

Don't let its cute and innocent appearance fool you. It's an instrument of pure evil

The rubber ducky puzzle is famous for being really ridiculously difficult. I honestly don't know how anyone could solve it without help. It never occurred to me that I had to feed bread to the seagull and fix the water pressure machine in order to open the electrical box across town so I could sneak into the movie theater. (I skipped like 25 steps in that description. I didn't want to spoil all the fun).

Rubber duckies notwithstanding, The Longest Journey amazed me with the most fantastic storytelling, world-building, and character development I've ever seen in a video game. If you don't mind dialogue heavy games (and there is a lot of dialogue) I highly recommend it. Don't let the dated character animations put you off a spectacularly enjoyable game.

Anyway, with the newest installment of The Longest Journey saga, Dreamfall Chapters, almost complete (I don't want it to end, but I also WANT MAH BOOK 5 NOW PLS), I really wanted to make some cupcakes inspired by the franchise. I did consider making rubber ducky cupcakes, but they'd have to be blue and with my food coloring sensitivity, I wasn't about to let the rubber ducky make me sick. He's caused me enough suffering.

The Balance between the parallel worlds of Stark (the world of science. AKA us) and Arcadia (the world of magic. AKA I want to go to there), however, is a consistent theme throughout all three games, and is the driving force behind the events of The Longest Journey (and is in peril again with the dream conspiracy in Dreamfall Chapters), so the Symbol of the Balance is an immediately recognizable representation of the game. When I found some chocolate cookie icing on clearance at the grocery store, I figured I could use that to make some royal icing transfers to decorate with.

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Now, I've worked with royal icing twice in my life (and once was just to draw a smiley face on Sherlock Cupcakes), and I've never made royal icing transfers before. However, I have read a lot of cookie decorating blogs (at one point in my life I decided I was going to start decorating cookies. Then I remembered how much I hate roll out dough. But they're still fun to look at), so I figured I knew enough to swing it. And actually, it wasn't that hard. Time consuming? Most definitely. But once it's dry, a royal icing transfer will keep for ages in an airtight container, so it's great for making ahead. The symbol of the balance actually lent itself well to royal icing, as it's mostly made up of fluid lines and not sharp edges. I did have to coax it into place a few times with a toothpick, but from all the cookie decorating blogs I've read, that seems normal.

All you need to do is print out the image you want (in my case, the symbol of the balance), tape it to a cookie sheet or similar flat surface, tape some waxed paper over top. Take your cookie icing in your "outline color" (I used Betty Crocker brand chocolate flavored) and follow the pattern. Let dry for a few hours.

Then I mixed up a small batch of flood consistency white royal icing (I just halved the recipe that comes with the Wilton meringue powder) and fill in all the empty spaces (use a toothpick to get the corners). I ended up doing a reverse image type deal because that was just easier, but either way works. (And if you don't know what "flood consistency" means, check out this post from LilaLoa. I'd try to explain it, but I'd probably just confuse you). Let dry at minimum over night. They take a very long time to dry, and if you try to remove them from the wax paper before they are, they'll be unsalvageable.

Then very carefully and gently remove them from the wax paper. These were thick enough that I had no trouble removing them, but I've seen people remove royal icing transfers using a knife and a sharp corner, so if you're making a delicate design, please refer to someone who actually knows what they're doing.

The Betty Crocker icing worked great (especially since I don't own tiny decorating icing tips, so using the pouch was easier for me) but it did bleed a little into the white. The bleeding itself wasn't that noticeable, but you can seen see in the photos that it makes it look like the chocolate has bloomed, which is not a thing you normally want chocolate to do.

The air bubbles are totally on me, though

There was no food coloring in the icing (I checked the ingredient list), so I didn't expect there to be any bleeding. I'm not sure if I just didn't let it dry long enough before flooding with the white, if it's just a problem with the prepackaged recipe, or if this is the reason it was on clearance. I can't actually seem to find anything about using Betty Crocker cookie icing to make a royal icing transfer, so it might just be that it was never intended for stuff like this and I should have realized that.

So in conclusion: Royal icing transfers are a surprisingly easy, though time consuming, way to make decorations, and you probably shouldn't use the cookie icing you bought on clearance to make them. Moving on...

Cupcakes! It took me a while to figure out exactly what kind of cupcake to make for these, because I wanted something that could represent the Balance flavor wise. I also wanted there to be a visual distinction between the two flavors. I considered doing just vanilla and chocolate, but I wanted it to be two flavors that wouldn't necessarily seem like they went together, so it would be a balanced flavor. Get it?

I also briefly considered making them yam flavored, because that would make Kian happy, but I ultimately decided against it. Mostly because I don't actually like yams.

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Kian will never forgive me

I'm not completely sure how I ultimately ended up with chai tea and hot chocolate. It might have had something to do with the fact that it was about 10 degrees out when I made them. (It's 50 degrees out right now. WTF, nature? Pull yourself together) But when you think about it, tea has a reputation of being very cultured and refined, so it could stand for logic (Stark). Hot chocolate is sweet and frivolous, and therefore could stand for chaos (Arcadia). Plus, they're both related, in that they're both hot beverages that you want to drink when it's 10 degrees out and probably add milk to.

Boom. Nailed it.

The cupcake will remember this

So technically, the whole cupcake is tea flavored, because it was easier to steep the tea in the milk than to figure out how to add it after I halved the batter. I started with my very favorite vanilla cupcake recipe, added the tea, and divided the batter in half. To one half, I added a packet of dark hot chocolate mix, and to the other, I added a chai spice mix of cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, allspice, and cloves. The flavors meld together well, but are still distinctive enough that you can taste the difference between the two halves. And what bridges the two halves? Storytime, of course.

Storytime is definitely the prettiest location in Dreamfall Chapers. Although Propast is still my favorite

Just kidding. I wouldn't know how to add a Storytime element to the cupcakes. Gooey dream-filled center? (Because Storytime is the world of dreams and dreams flow between the two worlds bridging the divide.)

Maybe the frosting? But no, the frosting is kind of more like the House of all Worlds. It touches both halves, it's part of the cupcake, but it's still separate from the actual cake part.

Whoa, this is getting deep.

The frosting is just my basic buttercream with some chai spices. I would have loved to do some whipped cream on top of these cupcakes, but I needed something sturdy for the RI transfers, so I went with my old standby. And it's still delicious.

So the moral of the story is that awesome video games deserve awesome cupcakes. And if you're not playing Dreamfall Chapters, you should go do that immediately. Or play The Longest Journey. Or Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (which is the middle game of the series and my least favorite. But still great, storywise). Because if you haven't played any of them, then you haven't earned these awesome cupcakes. Also, it means that you've never met Crow, who is basically just the best ever, and I feel sorry for you.

I kind of want to feed Crow all the cupcakes.

ILU Crow

Hot Chocolate and Chai Tea Cupcakes
Yield: 24 cupcakes

Ingredients
For the Chai Spice Mix:
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. cardamom
1/2 tsp. cloves
1/2 tsp. allspice

For the cupcakes:
2/3 cup milk
3 black tea bags
2 1/2 cups cake flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
3 eggs
8 oz. sour cream

1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 packet dark hot chocolate
1 tbsp.  Chai Spice mix

For the frosting:
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup solid white vegetable shortening (Crisco)
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
2 tbsp. milk
Remaining Chai Spice Mix (2 tsp.)
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
Pinch salt

Directions
In a small bowl, mix together the Chai Spice Mix ingredients. Set aside. In a small saucepan over low heat, bring the milk to a simmer. Add the tea bags and remove from heat. Allow to steep until the milk has cooled to room temperature. Remove and discard the tea bags.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 muffin tins with 24 cupcake liners. In a medium mixing bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and sale. Set aside. In the bowl of a stand mixer, or in a large mixing bowl with electric beaters, beat the butter and sugar together at medium speed until fluffy. Add the eggs, beating well after each addition. Add the vanilla and sour cream, and mix until fully combined. Mix in the milk and then the other half of the flour mixture. Beat until smooth, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary.

Divide the batter equally between two bowls. In one bowl, stir in the packet of hot chocolate mix. In the other bowl, stir in 1 tbsp. of chai spice mix. Divide each batter equally between the 24 baking cups. Bake 15-17 minutes, until an inserted toothpick comes our clean. Cool completely on wire racks.

For the frosting: With an electric mixer, beat the butter and shortening on medium speed until smooth. Reduce the speed to low and gradually add the powdered sugar. Add the milk, vanilla, and chai spice mix and gradually increase speed to high. Whip on high until smooth and fluffy.

Recipe by Kim

These cupcakes are an essential part of a well Balanced diet.

...

Crow would have appreciated that joke.

Life is Strange Blue Butterfly Cupcakes

Who knows what today is?

Okay, yeah, it's the 20th. Yes, it's also Tuesday. Do you know what else today is?

National Brandied Fruit Day? Interesting. But not the answer I was looking for.

Today is the day they release the final chapter of Life is Strange! You may remember that I've talked about Life is Strange before, when I played the first chapter and was super excited about the rest of the game. Well, today is the day they're releasing the fifth and final chapter and I'm still so super excited about the game, especially since Chapter 4 ended on an epic and horrible cliffhanger (full disclosure: I saw it coming. But apparently I'm an aberration, because a lot of people on the forums claimed it didn't make any sense. I think I'm just really good at anticipating surprise "twists" which is why I'm not a fan of mystery novels).

I was so excited about the Life is Strange finale that I knew I had to celebrate. And how do I celebrate? With cupcakes, obvi.

The blue butterfly is a major thematic element in the game, so I knew immediately they had to be blue butterfly cupcakes. The first time Max, the protagonist of the game, found out she had a unique ability to rewind time, she had just taken a photo of a blue butterfly.

Butterflies also appear throughout the game, usually to give the player hints or to highlight something significant. Really, I had no other option. And since they were going to be blue, I decided to add some frozen raspberries so they would be blue raspberry cupcakes.

These butterfly cupcakes are ridiculously simple to make. Bake some cupcakes, let them cool. Use a paring knife to cut a shallow round from the middle. Fill the hole you just made with whipped cream or frosting (I used a whipped buttercream). Take the middle piece you cut out, chop it in half, and put it on top of the frosting with the rounded edges facing in so they look like butterfly wings. And serve. Seriously, even the most novice of bakers could figure this one out.

I tried doing the chocolate butterfly thing from Hello Cupcake! but then I remembered how much I hate using melted chocolate in a pastry bag, and when I tried to do fancy swirlies with the toothpck like the instructions say, it looked awful. This one has no fancy swirlies, which is probably why it looks halfway decent, so I decided to use it. If you are not toothpick swirly incompetent, the chocolate butterflies are supposedly pretty easy.

If you've played Life is Strange, you know why I have a deer as a photo prop. If you haven't played it, you should go do that, and then the deer will make sense.

(Seriously though, even if you're not much of a gamer, you should play it. Gameplay is simple enough for a non-gamer to pick up, and the game is story driven rather than kill-the-monsters driven. And it's a really good story).

Blue Raspberry Butterfly Cupcakes
Yield: About 24 cupcakes, depending on recipe used

Ingredients
1 recipe vanilla cupcakes
1/4 tsp. raspberry extract
blue food coloring
1 cup fresh or frozen raspberries
Whipped cream or your favorite frosting

Directions
Prepare the cake batter according to recipe instructions, adding in the raspberry extract along with the vanilla. Add enough food coloring to reach your desired shade and fold in the raspberries. Bake according to the recipe instructions and cool completely on wire racks.

Use a small, sharp knife to cut out a shallow hole in the middle of the cupcake. Fill the hole with whipped cream or frosting. Take the circle of cake you just cut out and slice it in half. Place the two halves on top of the frosting with the rounded edges facing in, to look like butterfly wings.

Mother's Day Recipe Round Up

Happy Mother's Day to all you mamas out there! To celebrate, I figured I'd do a round up of all of my mama's favorite recipes from the blog.

Got any good mother's day plans? We're going into Brooklyn to celebrate my great uncle's birthday, but we'll have to work in a Marvel movie at some point because that's become tradition and you don't mess with tradition.

Spinach and Artichoke Bites: My mother keeps asking me when I'm making these again.

Cheesecake Stuffed Portal Cake: This was my brother's birthday cake, but my mom has already requested the same for her birthday. Or just the cheesecake part.

Raspberry Red Wine Sauce: I always have to save an extra jar just for her.

Cherry Almond Oatmeal Cookies

Mom: I want you to make me my cookies

Me: Your cookies?

Mom: Yeah, the cherry ones.

Sfogliatelle Scones: My mom is the one who actually named these scones, deciding that they tasted like one of her favorite Italian pastries but in the form of one of her favorite breakfast pastries

Raspberry Nutella Marshmallows: Whenever the subject of marshmallows comes up, my mom always says. "you should make the Nutella ones again. Those were good."

Zucchini Brownies: I actually developed this recipe for my mom in my pre-bloggy days. Fat free, super moist and chocolatey with hidden veggies, these are one of her favorite low-guilt treats

Raspberry Red Wine Ice Cream: This ice cream was inspired by the raspberry sauce above and has quickly become a favorite.

White Chocolate Chip Cupcakes: My mom often requested these cupcakes in my pre-bloggy days.

Orphan Black Forest Cupcakes

Who's excited for the season premiere of Orphan Black tonight?

Memememememememe!

If you guys haven't heard of Orphan Black before-- do you live under a rock or something? It's the sci fi thriller about the clones, starring the absolutely redonk acting talent of Tatiana Maslany. Seriously, every time I see that woman, I always have this brief moment of wondering which one she is, and then I remember she's not actually cloned. There's only one of her. Or so they tell me. I'm not completely sure I believe it.

Clone dance party!

And there are boy clones now, which means double the clone-y goodness.

I've had the idea of doing Black Forest cupcakes for Orphan Black for a while now, because the name just works (Orphan Black, Black Forest, Orphan Black Forest), and because cupcakes are kind of like clones of each other.

I totally just blew your mind, right?

Cosima and Delphine think it's a scientific breakthrough.

Just making Black Forest cupcakes wasn't enough, though. I needed to decorate the cupcakes somehow, but I couldn't think of any sort of recognizable symbol from the show, except for Tatiana's face and that's not something I felt I could put on a cupcake.

So I went a bit... deeper.

Cloned DNA. Obvi. (I've decided the pink ones are the Leda clones and the orange ones are the Castor clones)

Putting DNA on the cupcakes was really simple. (Excuse me while I giggle to myself) (Shut up, that was totally funny) You just take two strands from Pull 'n Peel Twizzlers (I used fruit punch flavored, which is why they're different colors, but any kind works), and weave them into a double helix shape. Then take a tube of decorating icing from the grocery store and use it to draw the base pairs.

I was originally going to create base pairs out of Mike 'n Ikes, but they were too fat, so I raided my supplies to find a tube of writing icing. I only had purple, but it worked. Helena's probably disappointed there's not more candy though.

She's a fan of sugar.

The cupcakes themselves are super simple, just chocolate cupcakes filled with cherry pie filling and topped with whipped cream. I decorated a few a little more traditionally with a maraschino cherry and the crumbled up cake middles mostly because I ran out of writing icing.

Don't forget to share with your sestras

Black Forest Cupcakes

Yield: 2 dozen cupcakes

Ingredients

8 oz. unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped

1 cup usalted butter

3 eggs

1½ cups sugar

¾ cup sour cream
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1½ cups flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. baking soda
Cherry pie filling (I used about half of a 20 oz. can)
1½ cups whipping cream
3 tbsp. powdered sugar
Maraschino cherries, to decorate
Optional decorations: Pull 'n Peel Twizzlers, writing icing

Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a small saucepan over low heat, melt the chocolate and the butter. Remove from heat and allow to cool to room temperature.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar together until the sugar is completely dissolved. Mix in the sour cream and vanilla extract. Add the cooled chocolate and mix until completely combined. Fold in the dry ingredients

Line a cupcake tin with paper liners, and fill about 2/3 of the way full with batter. Bake about 18-20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool completely on wire racks.

Use a cupcake corer or a sharp paring knife to core the cupcakes and fill them with cherry pie filling.

In a large bowl with electric beaters, beat the cream and the powdered sugar until stiff peaks form. Use to frost the cooled cupcake. Top with a maraschino cherries and crumbs from the discarded middles, if desired.

Recipe by Kim

Things you may need (affiliate links):

Frankenstein's Monster Cupcakes

Do you guys realize that every year I've had this blog, I've done a classic horror movie monster cupcake for Halloween? Last year, I did zombie cupcakes. The year before that, I did vampire fang cupcakes. The year before that, I didn't have a blog.

This year, I knew I wanted to keep that ball rolling, so I asked a friend what monster cupcakes I should make this year. Her answer was immediate: Frankenstein.

But Frankenstein cupcakes had been done to death, and by better decorators than I. Or so I thought. Every Frankenstein cupcake I came across was abso-freakin-lutely stinkin' adorable. Don't get me wrong, I love the cute, but at Halloween, I want something a little more gruesome.

So I sat down to brainstorm. How did I do Frankenstein cupcakes that were a) a little more gruesome, and b) accessible to my general lack of decorating skills?

I went back to the monster's origins. Dead flesh stitched back together and reanimated with the use of lightning and mad science. If the monster was flesh that had been stitched together, I could take green Airheads and "stitch" them together over a cupcake. And the frosting should be red, and I could add some red dessert sauce (I used the syrupy part of cherry pie filling) to make the gaps in the "flesh" look all raw and bloody.

Yes, these are words I used to talk about cupcakes.

I had originally intended to use shoe string licorice to stitch the Airheads together, but I couldn't find any, and I didn't really want to order it online. I ended up using a tube of black gel icing from the grocery store. Cookie icing, or a small batch of royal icing would probably work better, since gel can sometimes run.

The Airheads actually ended up being a little more difficult to deal with than I thought. While they were beautifully pliable after being microwaved for a couple of seconds, they harden back up very quickly. Luckily, I wanted raggedy edges and unevenness, so it ended up working out for me, but that's something to keep in mind. And the cherry pie filling can cause the Airheads to "melt," so either add them right before serving, or skip the pie filling "blood." (You can even skip the gaps in the "skin;" it didn't end up having quite the effect I envisioned)

I also decided to buy a nuts and bolts chocolate mold so I could make the monster's iconic neck bolts. I just melted some Merckens black chocolate wafers with some Merckens super white (Merckens black is really more of a very dark brown-- Wilton's gives you a truer black but Merckens tastes so much better), and dry brushed on some silver luster dust, which made them actually look super realistic. Then I just added a touch of red gel icing around the edge for that added touch of gore. I wanted it to look like the bolts had been jammed right in.

But the decorations don't stop at the top:

I colored the cupcakes green and filled the with more cherry pie filling for added oozey gore when you bite into them.

These cupcakes were a bit time consuming, but easy enough for the novice decorator, I think. Except for the chocolate mold and luster dust, there's not a single thing I used that isn't easy to find, most of which can even be found at the grocery store. The cupcakes can be baked, filled, and frosted ahead of time, too.

Cupcakes: I used my Birthday Cake Cupcakes, but Almond cupcakes would go really well with the cherry pie filling
Frosting: I used the same recipe from my Zombie Cupcakes, just added a little raspberry extract (because I thought it would go with the cherry and the watermelon Airheads) and a little whipping cream.
Filling/Blood sauce: Canned cherry pie filling
Skin: Watermelon Airheads. I liked the color of the watermelon better, but Green Apple would also work
Stitches: Black gel icing (royal icing might work better)
Bolts: Black and super white Merckens wafers, melted and poured into this nuts and bolts chocolate mold, and brushed with silver luster dust

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