Spider Cake

It all started with a cute metal pumpkin stand I picked up as a door buster at a local home decor store.  When I saw it, I immediately thought “cake stand” and knew the cake would be spider or spider web themed.  I found a bunch of cute spider cake ideas on pinterest.  What ultimately inspired this cake was a combination of these cute spider cupcakes from Tidy Mom and the monster cake I made for my son’s birthday party.

Spider Cake – Halloween Birthday Party

Spider Cake Tutorial

I made my first from-scratch birthday cake!  Man, I’m getting all homemakey.  I used this recipe from allcecipes.com because it had a ton of good reviews and a lot of people who had saved the recipe.  I doubled the recipe so I had enough batter. I also made a couple modifications based on reviews in the recipe.

White Cake Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 4 eggs
• 2 tablespsoons vanilla
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 1/2 cups milk

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour 2 9×9 inch pans or line a muffin pan with paper liners.
2. In a medium bowl, cream together the sugar and butter. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Combine flour and baking powder, add to the creamed mixture and mix well. Finally stir in the milk until batter is smooth. Pour or spoon batter into the prepared pan.
3. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes in the preheated oven. For cupcakes, bake 20 to 25 minutes. Cake is done when it springs back to the touch.

I split my batter into two bowls and colored one batch a dark purple and the other black .

Once the cake has cooled, frost the top of the bottom layer.  Place the top layer on top of the frosted bottom layer.  Frost the sides of the cake to make a smooth, flat edge – don’t frost the top yet.

Once the sides are frosted, sprinkle black sanding sugar on a cookie sheet.  Hold the cake by the top and bottom (the top hasn’t been frosted yet and I used a piece of round cake cardboard on the bottom of the cake) and roll the frosting on the sprinkles.

I had to roll it around several times and go back on touch up some areas by hand in order to get all of the areas covered.

Once the sides oh my spider cake were covered with black sanding sugar, I frosted the top of the cake and sprinkled the top with black sanding sugar.

I put sanding sugar in the palm of my hand and touched up the edges and any areas that needed some help.

When I sprinkled the sanding sugar, I placed the cake on the top of a wire grate so I could collect the excess sprinkles to use for some Halloween cupcakes.

I used the Babycakes cake pop maker to make the cake ball eyes.  I did these late at night when I was tired and burnt out for the day, so they didn’t turn out quite as good as I was hoping.  But then again, it’s Halloween so the uglier the better, right!  I dipped the cake balls in white chocolate and used M&M’s for eyes.

Here’s the finished spider cake with the cake pop eyes and the metal pumpkin holder spider legs as a cake stand.

Here’s what the inside – guts of the spider – looked like! 🙂

The spider cake was a hit.  It was the perfect addition to our somewhat spider themed first birthday and Halloween party!