Spiderman, Spiderman.....

Last month my sister in law asked me if I would make Spiderman cupcakes for my nephew's birthday party.  Apparently she was impressed by my Elmo and Cookie Monster cupcakes at Bug's party and thought I knew what I was doing. Of course I said yes, but inside I was panicking. I am not a particularly good baker. I'm not that good of an artist. And actually I'm not very creative.  To make Spiderman cupcakes, you need to be all of those things. Thankfully I got some good ideas from Pinterest as far as the design and Funfetti cake mix never lets me down. So it is more about getting the design right. And honestly I didn't have any idea what Spiderman really looked like until I looked it up.  But luckily he is red and I had red food coloring and red cupcake liners left over from my Elmo cupcakes. So first, obviously, I baked the cupcakes and let them cool. Can I just ask a question though, is it just me or does anyone actually get 24 cupcakes out of 1 box? I never do.  This time I got 19 and the last 2 were pretty pitiful.  Anyway so I just had a can of icing and mixed in the food coloring.  This is the color I got, but it got redder the longer it sat.

  

 

So next I needed to make the face.  My plan was to do black webbing and then make white Spiderman eyes. I bought a black gel pen and Sugar Sheets. I got these at Michael's.

 

 

 

Doing the black webbing wasn't really that hard. This is the design I used.  I just made it up and it looked ok on the cupcakes.

 

 

 

After the webbing was done (which got done faster since I had a special guest helping me), I had to make the eyes. This was a mess! I had never used these Sugar Sheets before, and actually had never even heard of them, but they seemed like they would be the easiest. HA! They were so hard to cut, and to cut straight was impossible. I used scissors, because on the back label it said you could. I could not get the shape I wanted though.  So I tried a knife. They came out jagged though. This was the shape I was trying to make.

 

 

 

 

That is probably the best eye out of all of them. I tried to fold the sheet in half and do 2 at a time so they would be even, but the edges just crumbled.  The more I cut the worse it got.

 

 

 

 

Seriously, what do you cut these things with?! Is there a secret tool I don't know about??

 



 

 

Finally I had cut the whole sheet, and I did not have enough eyes for 19 cupcakes. At this point it was about midnight the night before the party so I didn't have the option to go get another sugar sheet. Fortunately, earlier in the day at a blog business meeting, Hooch and B told me not to even worry about doing the eyes, and Hooch offered to get plastic spiders for the tops of the cupcakes since she was going to Target that night.  So in the end I had enough white eyes to do about half the cupcakes.

 

 

  

 

And after an early morning visit from Hooch on her way to the gym, the rest of the cupcakes got spiders.

 

 

 

So these definitely weren't my best cupcakes, and I'll never use those Sugar Sheets again, but the Birthday Boy approves, and that's all that really matters!