Australians don’t really embrace Halloween. I grew up thinking that it was a really “American” thing to do. I’m not making a comment on the origins of Halloween, or its potential pagan roots; I mean the commercialised, gore-loving, pumpkin-carving Halloween that is marketed to us every year.

As much as I think it’s a pretty weird occasion to celebrate, I do love an excuse to decorate cupcakes! I realised, however, that I’m no good at genuinely gruesome or scary things…my Halloween cupcakes are like a cutesy kind of gross. Like Frankenstein and the Powerpuff girls collaborated.

Or something like that.

Instead of going for the stereotypical black and orange, I went colourful. Who could say no to a  rainbow-legged spider? Or fluoro worms?

I’ll be publishing one Halloween idea per day this week, so stay tuned! Subscribe if you want to stay in the loop, or follow Baking with Gab on Facebook!

To kick things off, how does everyone feel about some angry owl cupcakes?

They’re super simple!

You’ll need:

• 1 chocolate cupcake mixture
• Vanilla buttercream (150g butter, 2 cups icing sugar, 1 tsp vanilla)
• White chocolate buttons
• Black writing icing
• M&Ms

I used the cupcake mixture from this post for these little birdies.

When you’ve got your cupcakes baked and cooled, whip the butter, icing sugar and vanilla together until smooth and pale. Pipe or spoon enough buttercream, onto each cupcake to cover it generously. They don’t have to be perfect, don’t worry!

Grab two buttons for each cupcake that you have (you should need 24 buttons) and press them into the icing in the middle of the cupcake. Grab your writing icing pen and squeeze a blob into the middle of each of the eyes. If you want googley eyes, put the black dot anywhere in the chocolate button.

Now take your M&Ms and pick out two brown ones (for eyebrows) and one orange one (for the beak) per cupcake.  So you’ll need 36 M&Ms in total. Place the eyebrow M&Ms so that they make the birds look angry, then place the beak M&M in the middle of the two buttons.

And you’re done! Pop them in the fridge for a while to ensure that everything is set and that they stay in place.

There are more creepy/cute cupcake ideas coming these week – stay tuned!