A kawaii halloween

I completed this project just before we left for our last minute trip to Sydney. But ran out of time to type it up. Unfortunately, the flights we were on didn’t have wifi activated so I’ve done it now. One of the benefits of jet lag is the burst of energy at 3 am in the morning!

I never celebrated Halloween growing up. So I’ve no traditions or any real idea of what Halloween entails other than the small number of little ghosts and ghouls that trick or treat our apartment block each year. So when a friend of mine asked me to come up with some Halloween decorations for cupcakes for a party she intends to hold for her son, I felt a bit unsure of what to do. 
I did some research and just couldn’t get excited about making scary, ghoulish cupcake toppers dripping in fake blood. So I considered how else I could put them together. I looked up at my collection of Bearbrick’s and saw the Horror ones I had, they were quite cute! So my idea for kawaii Halloween cupcake toppers was born!

I made a batch of white modelling chocolate and coloured it with gel food colouring, rolling the different coloured chocolate out on a piece of baking paper laid over the top of my cutting mat. I left the chocolate to harden for a few hours.

Laying cutouts of the templates I created over the top of the semi-hardened modelling chocolate, I cut out the individual pieces using a scalpel with a new (sterile) blade and thoroughly cleaned scalpel handle (you could also use an x-acto knife). This gave me nice clean lines. I layered the pieces on top of each other, stuck them together with simple syrup and allowed them to harden further. Adding the eyes out of small flattened balls of white and black modelling chocolate (also adhered with a little simple syrup). I then cut in the mouths and scar on Frankenstein.

Once they were reasonably hard I placed them on the frosted cupcakes.

I’ve been asked repeatedly to create a tutorial to make modelling chocolate. It’s really quite easy. You melt chocolate in a double boiler, add corn syrup, stir to combine and place in cling wrap in the fridge to harden. Kneading it to add colour and to smoothen it (much like fondant).

But rather than recreate a tutorial I suggest you go and look at this one. It’s fabulously detailed and allows you to see what to do if you have too little or too much corn syrup in your modelling chocolate.

But you might not want to create the toppers out of modelling chocolate…

So I’ve created a template that you can print and use to create the modelling chocolate versions or you can print them out onto cardstock, cut each of the figures out and stick to candy sticks to insert in your cupcakes!

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