Last October I volunteered to make mini-cupcakes for my son’s first-grade class Halloween party. (My son’s allergic to eggs, so if I make the cupcakes, he gets to have some, too.) I had just completed cake decorating classes, so I confidently came up with two designs and spent hours piping dozens of tiny spiderwebs, spiders and little jack-o-lanterns sitting on green grass. I proudly presented them to the first grade, only to see them devoured or ignored, even squashed on the floor. This year, the second grade got orange icing with stick-in characters I bought at Target. The kids were just as happy, apathetic or displeased, with very little effort on my part.

However, I do enjoy coming up with Halloween cake designs, and I had a bunch of neon-colored fondant left over from a Wilton class project, so I decided to make a Halloween cake to take to a friend’s party.

This was fun and fairly easy. You will need:

• 2 8- or 9-inch cake layers of your choice (See below for tips on eggless.)
• Your choice of cake frosting
• Wilton Neon Colors Fondant, plus approximately 1 cup white fondant
• Wilton Icing Tube, black
• Yellow sprinkles
• Wilton tips No. 3 and 12
• Assorted Halloween cookie cutters
• Wilton fondant letter cutters
• Fondant rolling mat
• Rolling pin
• Prepared gum paste adhesive
• Small paintbrush

1) Bake two 8- or 9-inch layers of your choice. (For eggless, Pillsbury’s Moist Supreme mix works very well with Ener-G powdered egg replacer, available at health food stores. I used Devil’s Food, of course.)

2) Cover cake with a thin coating of buttercream icing. I didn’t do this. As you can see, my cake is a little rounded on the edges instead of wedding-perfect. That’s because I don’t love fondant and I do love chocolate buttercream, so I slathered on the amount of buttercream that I’d normally use on a cake. This wasn’t a wedding or a contest, after all; it was for my friends to eat.

I sketched my design by tracing the bottom of the cake pan and cookie-cutter shapes on a piece of paper.

3) For the orange icing, I used the entire orange packet from the Wilton Neon set, plus a roughly equal amount of Wilton pink fondant I’d bought by mistake. (You can use white.) Mix the fondant and roll out to a 16- or 17-inch circle, then drape over the cake and trim. You can find instructions for doing that here.

Last year, I went a little crazy making mini-cupcakes for the first-grade Halloween party.

4) I didn’t have any black fondant on hand, so I used purple instead, which I think is more appetizing anyway.  Using cookie cutters and fondant letter cutters, I cut out the yellow moon, two purple bats, four purple cats, four white ghosts and four orange pumpkins. I applied yellow

This year, the second grade got orange frosting and decorations from Target.

sprinkles for eyes on the cats and bats using gum paste adhesive and tweezers. Be prepared to curse while doing this. For the ghosts, I dotted black icing eyes with the No. 3 tip, although if I’d had a black edible marker handy, I would’ve used that. I cut tiny triangle eyes and smiles out of yellow fondant for the jack-o-lanterns. I arranged the top elements as pictured, leaving room for the icing spiderweb, and attached with gum paste adhesive. I then alternated ghosts, cats and jack-o-lanterns on the side of the cake, leaving room for a border, and attached with gum paste adhesive.

3) I used black Wilton icing tube with a No. 3 tip to pipe on the spiderweb. Next year I am going to cut open the tube, scrape out the icing and add a little powdered sugar to make it easier to control. Yes, I will do anything to avoid making black icing myself. I piped on the spider’s body and head using a No. 12 tip, then added the legs with the No. 3 tip. Using tweezers,  I stuck two yellow sprinkles in its head for eyes.

4) I think this cake would have looked better with a purple fondant ball boarder using 1/2-inch purple balls, but I ran out of purple. I also might have incorporated green into the border and on the jack-o-lanterns, but I ran out of time. I had orange buttercream left over from the cupcakes, so I made a shell border instead.

Despite all the storebought fondant, this cake was a hit with kids and adults alike.

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