spiderweb cupcakes

I hope everyone had a great cupcake week!  For the last day of this special week, I have to post the easiest, cutest Halloween cupcake ever.  This is the icing spiderweb cupcake!  This year I amped it up by coloring the icing (just a mix a couple drops of food color  in about 1 c confectioner sugar to 2 teaspoons water, or however much it takes to get kind of runny, but not too runny consistency.  When a dipped spoon is tipped and held over the bowl it should slowly ribbon off.  If it goes super-fast it is too loose and will not stay on the cupcake top, if it does not budge or is gloppy add more water, a drop at a time.)  I then just mixed and matched because, little known fact, spiders like to mix it up!   I used a red velvet for the base of these, but any flavor will work and any color cupcake will work, the icing will cover it up (it is opaque). 

Here is the easy, peasy how to (do not show this to any actual spiders, they will be really upset to see how easy it is to make a cupcake spider web and might go on strike).

1. make your sugar water mixtures (about 1 c confectioners sugar with 2 teaspoons water), pour in different bowls to dye different colors.

2. Coat the cupcake with the base color.

3. swirl a spiral pattern on the top of the cupcake with a contrasting color. Repeat with second color, if wanted.

4. pull a toothpick or skewer through the spiral starting from the center and radiating out to edge. Make at least 5 of these radiating lines, gently, making a web pattern.

5. that’s literally it!

            These cupcakes scream for attention and for the movie Arachnophobia.  When this movie came out everyone in my whole school saw it.  It created a 5^th grade class at Clopper Mill Elementary that was obsessed with phobias.  We spent the year trying to guess and figure out the words for obscure and weird phobias, and this was before the internet, so it was hard!  We jeered that people had Nyctophobia (fear of the dark) at sleepovers.  We told boys their flip flops were giving us podophobia (fear of feet) while running away shrieking and giggling.  We were big jerks.  We basically took this simple movie about spiders and created a whole phobia centered universe that pretty much gave everyone phobophobia (fear of phobias).  It wasn’t until years later that I heard Tyra Banks talk about her dolphin?!?!!? phobia that it struck me how strange phobias are, especially ones about dolphins (no offence Tyra). Can people have phobias of things they have never actually seen?  Did she know she had delphiniphobia from pictures of dolphins in children’s books? Or was it the idea of them lurking in the ocean, laughing, eating fish and being all dolphin that just freaked her out?  How many dolphins have people phobia?   Well, Arachnophobia is totally Tyra safe, since there are no dolphins or porpoises in sight, just lots of creepy, crawly spiders, including deadly ones that threaten the whole town. Luckily, John Goodman is on the case! Make like you have 8 legs and get over to Amazon Prime to check out this darkly comic movie!