Easy Spider Cake for Birthday or Halloween Party

With a birthday in October, there’s bound to be some overlap with Halloween once in awhile. This was one of those years. We had an early family Halloween party that included a cute spider birthday cake for the birthday boy. Although my little guy is not a big fan of scary monsters or scary spiders, he was super excited about this double chocolatey “friendly” spider cake and it fit right in with the Halloween decor.

The chocolate cake was baked in two small round Pyrex glass dishes. We used a homemade chocolate cake recipe from the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook and our standard buttercream frosting recipe for the chocolate icing. I really like that this cake uses cocoa for the chocolate brown color and doesn’t require any food coloring in the icing. The cake was displayed on a round black serving tray where I used white frosting to pipe a spiderweb for the base. Grandma swirled chocolate buttercream on the chocolate cakes with a spatula and placed them on top of the frosted spider web. Red Twizzlers were inserted for the spider legs and some icing was used for the eyes and smile. A red number 4 candle finished off this spider birthday cake.

Since it was a small cake, we made a batch of cupcakes too. My little guy loves to help in the kitchen, so we decided to let all the kiddos at the party decorate cupcakes for everyone.

They chose the icing (vanilla or chocolate) and all the candy toppings including:  two sizes of chocolate chips, M&Ms, Reese's pieces, candy corn, mini marshmallows, and candy eyeballs which were especially popular. Some kids accepted special topping requests, but most designs were entirely up to each decorator. Everyone received a one of a kind cupcake creation to sample. It was so much fun, it may become a new family tradition.

Happy Halloween!