Melted Witch Cupcakes

Yesterday I finally knocked another item off my baking bucket list. One of the things that regularly pops up when you google Halloween cupcakes is:

You can find the recipe for the first cupcake here, and the 2nd is a Pinterest image. Anyways, this led to “Melted Witch” cupcakes landing on my baking bucket list. I used my regular chocolate cake recipe which is modified from this, but most of the work went into decorating. I think they turned out pretty cute.

Ingredients: (makes ~24 cupcakes)
For the cake:

• 1 3/4 cup flour
• 1 1/2 cup white granulated sugar
• 1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup boiling water

For the frosting:

• 1/2 cup butter (2 sticks), room temperature
• 1 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• green food coloring (I used about 1/2 a tablespoon.)
• 1 1/2 tbsp heavy cream

Decorations:

• 1/4 pound of milk/dark chocolate
• 12 oreos
• 24 Hershey kisses

Directions: 

Cake batter:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit now.
2. In a large bowl, mix together flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
3. Add eggs, milk, vegetable oil, and vanilla extract. Mix for about 2 minutes, or until everything is just incorporated.
4. Add boiling water slowly, mixing as you add it. The batter will be fairly thin.
5. Line a muffin/cupcake pan with cupcake liners. Fill each liner about 2/3 of the way up. I used a 1/4 cup measuring cup for this which worked pretty well.
6. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a cupcake comes out clean. Mine took around 27 minutes.

Frosting:

1. Using a spatula, or the paddle attachment on your stand mixer, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy (about 15 minutes by hand or 8 to 10 minutes by stand mixer on med.).
2. Add heavy cream and mix for an additional 3 to 5 minutes, until smooth and creamy. Add more cream if frosting is too thick, and more sugar if it is too thin.
3. Add food coloring and mix until frosting achieves desired shade of green.

Assembly:

1. To make the witch legs/feet: Lay out a sheet of parchment paper. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler (Put the chocolate in a heat safe bowl. Put the bowl over a pot filled with warm water. Bring the water to a boil, and stir the chocolate every so often. This should give you a smooth melted chocolate mixture.) Remove the bowl from the pot and wait for the chocolate to cool until it is warm to the touch, but not hot. Transfer the chocolate to a sandwich size ziplock. Cut a small hole in the corner of the ziplock. Pipe shoe and leg shapes onto the parchment paper. I mostly went for a vague shoe shape attached to a stick. You will need 48 legs for 24 cupcakes. Pop into the fridge to set.
2. To make the witch hats: Remove filling from Oreos. Pipe or scoop a small circle of frosting onto the center of an Oreo cookie. Top with a Hershey’s kiss.
3. Frost the cupcakes using your favorite frosting method. I transferred my frosting to a piping bag and used a standard round tip. I then decided I wanted it to look more melty so I took a spoon and smeared the frosting. You could just scoop some frosting onto your cupcakes and use a butter knife to smooth it out.
4. Add a hat and two legs to each cupcake!

Notes:

• This yields a lightly sweet chocolate cake. For a sweeter cake, up the sugar to 2 cups.
• I actually ended up with around 30 cupcakes, so I needed a bit more decorations.
• I accidentally put the kisses on the interior of the Oreos instead of the exterior. Assembling this with the kisses on the exterior gets rid of the issue of the residual Oreo filling.
• I like my cupcakes lightly frosted. For a more typical amount of frosting make 1.5 to 2 times the recipe.
• The Pinterest picture has legs/feet make out of straws and boots cut out of paper. You could also use pretzel sticks. I was just too lazy to buy more things and had a pound of chocolate laying around that I needed to use.