Halloween Treat

I discovered a recipe for Candy Corn Cupcakes via our local newspaper, and I had to try them out.  They just looked like fun, and I had all the ingredients on hand – plus candy corn for a garnish.

Here’s what mine ended up looking like:

The recipe uses a pound cake – probably to make the color separation a little easier to achieve.  The batter is split and tinted with food coloring, and it uses orange extract as a flavoring.  The frosting is a vanilla buttercream.

The cupcake needed the frosting, because the pound cake was kind of dry.  The buttercream was very rich and tasty, which helped.  I don’t think the orange extract really worked, because “orange” is not the flavor I associate with candy corn.  But it wasn’t bad tasting, it just wasn’t great.

The batter was layered – this made it very labor-intensive – and then turned upside down to frost and serve.  It’s supposed to invoke the look of a triangle of candy corn.  I think the cupcake would work better as a mini cupcake, because it would look smaller and be bite-sized, which is what the candy is supposed to be like… but the work involved to make this as a mini cupcake blows my mind.

Regardless, I baked them, frosted them, and took them with me to small group last night.  I had also made chocolate cupcakes and brought a dozen of those, since this recipe only made 16 cupcakes, and the Webmaster and I had to test one before it could even be frosted to make sure it was okay and check the colors inside.  All the kids at small group were clamoring to have a cupcake, but we held them off until the end of the evening.  Auntie is our group’s babysitter, so she was watching the kids (there were nine kids downstairs and three little ones upstairs) in the downstairs family room.  As I walked into the room at the end of our meeting, Tad and one of the other boys had just bonked their heads together while they were running around.  Tad, typically, just rubbed the sore spot and said, “Ow, my head,” and kept going.  That boy has a skull made of steel.  The other boy, P., who is in his age group, was in tears over the collision.  Auntie, who had witnessed the whole thing and knew it had just been an accident, was working on consoling him when I came in and announced, “Cupcake time!”

You’ve never seen a room empty so fast.  Auntie commented, “I’ve never seen P. dry his tears that fast.”  He had gone past me yelling, “CUPCAKES!!!”

All the kids picked their cupcakes and tore into them – except Tad.  I had a gluten-free chocolate cupcake for him, but I’d frosted it with the vanilla buttercream and stuck a candy corn on it (all the cupcakes had candy corn on them, even the chocolate ones.  I know what matters to kids).  Tad sits down, gets his cupcake unwrapped, and then takes his time to enjoy it.  While the other kids are gobbling their cupcakes up, he is positively savoring each bite.  I’ve never known a kid to do this, but Tad does.  It takes him at least twice as long as the other kids to eat his cupcake.  I love baking for him, even if it is gluten-free.

So, while it was a lot of work, the Candy Corn Cupcake was a hit with the kids and adults, even if it wasn’t the best tasting cupcake ever.  More experimenting is definitely called for, don’t you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at 2:11 am and is filed under Being Crafty, Children, From the Church Front.
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