Easy Halloween Cupcakes with a Jammy ‘Blood’ Filling.

- Louise Szeto, Exeter -

With Halloween just around the corner, these easy cupcakes are the perfect treat for a Halloween party, or equally for satisfying a sweet tooth! They’re simple and require minimal effort, look impressive, and taste great too. So, whether you’re hosting a party or just spending the night in with your friends, why not give these a try!

You will need:

12 cupcakes – you can bake these yourself (click here for a simple vanilla cupcake recipe), or alternatively buy a pack from the supermarket – I opted for the latter in order to keep this recipe as simple as possible

Any red coloured jam – I used strawberry, but raspberry would work just as well

50g softened unsalted butter

100g icing sugar

1tsp vanilla extract or essence

A dash of milk

Halloween-themed sprinkles and sweets of your choice

Firstly, you will want to make the buttercream. To do this, place the softened butter into a large bowl. Then, sift in the icing sugar in two stages, mixing in between. Add in the vanilla and milk to flavour and loosen the buttercream to a pipeable consistency. Now that your buttercream icing is ready, you can set it aside as it is if you want to just spread it onto your cupcakes. However, if you want an extra bit of decoration, fill a piping bag - lined with a nozzle of your choice (I used a star-shaped nozzle) – with your buttercream. Set this aside while you prepare your cupcakes.

To prepare your cupcakes, you will need to cut out a hole in the centre of each of them in order to make space for the jammy ‘blood’ filling. To do this, I used the large end of a piping tip as it was the perfect size for my cupcakes, but if you don’t have a spare piping tip, a sharp knife will work too. Carefully remove a small chunk from the centre of each cupcake and replace the space with a spoonful of jam. Once you have done this, your cupcakes are ready to be iced and decorated!

There really are no rules to how you should decorate your cupcakes, so get creative! I piped a swirl of buttercream onto mine, before topping them with a variety of Halloween sprinkles and gummy sweets.