If you missed our Facebook Live tutorial on how to make the most ghoulish Halloween sponges around, you can still watch our video and gather a few clever tips on how to make your cupcakes the spookiest ever!

Here we remind you of our baker Jo’s tips on how to make your cupcakes extra ghastly as well as adding a few fun decorating ideas. Ideal for your little monsters to get involved with.

How to colour fondant icing

If you’re pushed for time you can buy your fondant icing ready coloured, but it’s also easy to colour white fondant yourself at home with gel food colouring.

Add the colour sparingly and knead with food-safe gloves to avoid staining your hands. The colour will deepen so continue to knead patiently until it is fully blended.

How to colour frosting black

If you want to dye your cupcake frosting black, we recommend making chocolate frosting with cocoa, which is naturally dark, and then adding black gel food colouring.

Not only does it taste deliciously chocolatey but it also saves on a lot of black food colouring! Very dark shades of colouring are much better saved for accent colours on your cupcakes.

How to stop fondant sticking

Fill a clean cloth with a few tablespoons full of cornflour and keep this on hand to dust your work surfaces before rolling out sugar fondant.

Dust surfaces liberally to prevent the fondant from sticking and making a mess. Always clean your surfaces between different colours or they will get mixed in.

Use seasonal ingredients

Try adding seasonal ingredients to your cupcakes with recipes that use pumpkin puree and fresh beetroot, both taste wonderful in chocolate sponges and add extra moisture.

Save time with ready-made googley eyes

Don’t spend your Halloween making hundreds of googley eyes from fondant!

Buy easily available ready-made decorations like these and you’ll give your cupcakes a professional touch (whilst also leaving more time for your costume prep!).

Stencil cupcake decorations

For even speedier cupcake decorating, stencils are a great alternative to fondant cut-out shapes.

Just dust over some icing sugar or cocoa powder onto a contrasting sponge or frosting and you will have a spooktacular cake decoration before your very eyes.

Use different piping nozzles

If you’d rather skip the fondant modelling and you have a few of those edible googly eyes to hand, you can actually make lots of designs with just the help of your piping bag.

Experiment with piping nozzles to give different effects with your frosting. Ribbon nozzles can make bandages from buttercream for mummy cupcakes and grass nozzles give a fuzzy monster fur effect.

How to make caramel 'blood' cupcake filling 

Fill your cupcakes with dulce de leche coloured with red gel food colouring for a gorey, gooey surprise. Warning: this blood-red caramel centre is not for the faint-hearted!

Halloween 2017

For bone-chilling bakes and spine-tingling sponges, as well as our brand new killer Pumpkin Cheesecake (to die for), order our Halloween cake collection here.

We’ll also be baking our Chocolate and Pumpkin Cupcakes with mini fondant bat decorations all month at our bakeries along with a return of our customer favourites: Pumpkin Pie and Pumpkin Whoopie Pies!

Hop on your brooksticks and head down to our seven haunted bakeries here.