Decorated Halloween Cupcakes (Video) - Sally's Baking Addiction

Learn how to make decorated Halloween cupcakes in 4 designs with these simple tutorials that are perfect for decorating beginners. Start with your favorite flavor of cupcakes, make the vanilla buttercream frosting, and then follow the directions and video to dress up your cupcakes as monsters, jack-o’-lanterns, and spiders. These fun treats are EYE-deal for serving at your next monster mash bash!

4 Simple Halloween Cupcakes Designs

Using piping tips doesn’t have to be frightful! These cute Halloween cupcake designs are simple enough for decorating beginners. Using a small handful of piping tips, a batch of cupcakes, frosting, gel food coloring, and some candy eyeballs, I created 4 different designs:

1. Purple Monsters
2. Green Monsters (channeling Mike Wazowski here)
3. Jack-O’-Lanterns
4. Spiders

Save your fear face for the haunted house and let’s get started!

Start With Your Favorite Cupcakes

The Halloween cupcakes pictured in this post are pumpkin cupcakes. However, you can use any flavor such as: vanilla cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes, red velvet cupcakes, confetti cupcakes, or try these delicious cream-filled chocolate cupcakes—you could tint the cream filling orange, or even blood-red for a spooky treat vampires would love to sink their fangs into!

No matter which cupcakes you choose, make sure they are completely cooled before you begin decorating.

Use a Sturdy Buttercream Frosting

The best frosting option for decorating these Halloween cupcakes is definitely vanilla buttercream. I slightly scaled up the recipe so there’s enough for these fun decorations. You want a very sturdy white frosting that will pipe on easily and hold the detailed designs. If you prefer a less-sweet frosting, you could also use this Swiss meringue buttercream. You could use cream cheese frosting, but the piping won’t be as defined.

I strongly recommend using the vanilla buttercream recipe in the recipe card below. I love it because while it’s sturdy, pipe-able, and tint-able to any color, it’s also sweet, creamy, and tastes great on pretty much any flavor cupcake. Functional as well as tasty—this frosting delivers both tricks AND treats!

Gel food coloring is ideal and I used Americolor Orange, Leaf Green, Super Black, and Fuchsia + Violet (I used a little of each to make a pinkish purple).

Monster Cupcakes

Aren’t the monster cupcakes so silly? You can make both designs with the same open star piping tip. If you’re also making the jack-o’-lantern cupcakes, you’ll use the same tip for the pumpkin stem. As an alternative look for monster fur, you could use a grass tip like Wilton 233, which is what I use for Cookie Monster cake and Elmo cake.

Here’s everything you need to make both monsters:

• Gel Food Coloring: I use Leaf Green for the green monster. I also use the smallest dot of Super Black to mute the color, since leaf green can be a little neon. For the pictured purple monster, I use Fuchsia + Violet to make a bright pinkish purple shade.
• Disposable Piping Bags or Reusable Piping Bags
• Open Star Piping Tip: Use Wilton #21 for both monster designs
• Couplers are needed if you’re switching around your piping tips and frosting colors. Because you use the same tip for both the green and purple frosting, a coupler makes it easy to switch the tip between bags of frosting.
• Candy Eyeballs: You need large candy eyeballs for the green monster, and small candy eyeballs for the purple monster. If you can find an assorted size pack of candy eyeballs, that’s the best thing to buy to make these monster cupcakes as well as the spider cupcakes.
• Halloween Sprinkles: Optional, but a fun addition!

For the green monster, you’ll pipe a simple spiral of green-tinted frosting onto the cupcake, then place a large candy eyeball in the center. For the purple monster, you’ll pipe little stars across the surface of the cupcake, the same way you make hydrangea cupcakes for this cupcake bouquet. Add on some small candy eyeballs and sprinkles, and your monsters are ready to party!

Jack-o’-Lantern Halloween Cupcakes

To make these jack-o’-lantern Halloween cupcakes, you need 3 frosting colors (black, orange, + green) and 3 different piping tips. The great news is that you use 2 of the frosting colors and tips for the other decorated cupcakes. The green monster cupcakes use the same piping bag/tip as the pumpkin stem and the spider cupcakes use the same piping bag/tip as the jack-o’-lantern’s eyes, nose, and mouth.

Here’s everything you need for these jack-o’-lantern cupcakes:

Use the petal tip to pipe the orange frosting on first. Start with the sides and work your way in, finishing with a vertical line down the middle. Add on the green stem. Then use the black frosting fitted with a small round tip to draw on the eyes, nose, and mouth. Make it as goofy or spooky as you like!

Spider Cupcakes

To make these spider cupcakes, you only need white and black frosting and 1 piping bag and small round piping tip. The little spiders are mini Oreo cookies!

Here’s everything you need for these spider cupcakes:

• Gel Food Coloring: Super Black
• 1 Disposable Piping Bag or Reusable Piping Bag
• Small Round Piping Tip: I use Wilton 4
• Oreo Mini Cookies: Twist open the mini Oreos to separate them. I scrape off the filling so that the spider sits a little lower on the cupcake, but you can leave the filling on if you’d like.
• Mini Candy Eyeballs: Use the tiniest ones you can find! Have you ever seen these decorated Halloween cookies before? Use the same teeny eyeballs on the decorated bat cookies. If you can’t find the mini ones, you can substitute ball-shaped sprinkles.

Start by spreading the white frosting onto the cupcake, smoothing it out across the top and around the edges. A small offset icing spatula works best for this, but if you don’t have one, just use a knife. Pipe the black web across the top, then add half a mini Oreo cookie wherever you’d like your spider to sit.

Finally, pipe 2 small dots of black frosting onto the Oreo and gently press the mini candy eyeballs to them to stick. Finish by piping on 8 black frosting legs.

Obviously spider webs are white, so you could swap the black and white frostings here:

Another option for spider cupcakes: Make these cream-filled chocolate cupcakes topped with chocolate ganache. Then use the white whipped buttercream filling to pipe a web on top of the ganache. You’ll need to tint a small amount of the remaining whipped buttercream black to pipe the spiders’ legs.

Frosting Color Success Tips

1. Use gel food coloring, not liquid food coloring. Liquid coloring isn’t as concentrated, so you usually need more—and more liquid could alter the consistency of your frosting.
2. As frosting sits, it darkens. As icing sits in a piping bag before using AND as it sets on the cupcake, its color darkens. This is the case with most colors, particularly red and black. When I make black icing, it’s usually blue-ish gray in the bowl and piping bag, and then as it dries, it darkens into a fully black shade. Don’t go overboard on adding in food coloring because the color will deepen as the frosting dries.
3. Tone down color brightness: To keep colors from looking too neon, add a teeny, tiny drop (I use the tip of a toothpick for this) of black food coloring into your bowl of frosting and mix in well. This helps tone down the brightness of the color, giving you a more muted hue.
4. If you don’t want to use food coloring, you can decorate the pumpkin and monster cupcakes with untinted frosting and then cover the surface in colored sprinkles.

Not too difficult, right?

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