Halloween Cupcakes: Trick or Treat?
You definitely don’t want to be the girl bringing a big bag of Milk Duds or Smarties to a Halloween party. You can be especially spooktacular if you come bearing healthy, tasty and frightfully scary Halloween cupcakes. You might want to wear an angel or Mother Theresa costume to match your wholly good deed.
Sticking with the Halloween color theme is easy—carrots, sweet potatoes and pumpkin are orange and make a really tasty, healthy cupcake batter; and in case you’ve been living under a pumpkin, chocolate is now considered a superfood (proof that there are indeed good witches!). Its rich brown color is due to the highest amount of antioxidants available in any food.
Top your masterpieces with vegan frosting recipes that use ghoulishy good ingredients such as coconut oil and agave nectar. You can use some of the candy that seems to only make an appearance during Halloween to decorate: candy corn as noses, shoelace licorice as mouths, mini-marshmallows as teeth, Red Hots as eyes, and don’t even get me started on what you can do with taffy. Granted, all those decorations don’t quite fall into the healthy category, but a little fun goes a long way, especially with a personal one-of-a-kind Halloween decoration.
There’s a lot of magic in cupcakes, just ask the folks at Babycakes, who regularly see my face splayed up against their vegan cupcake counter in downtown LA. (I can’t bake ’em, but I sure can eat ’em.) You can create tasty gluten-free options like Babycakes does, which will be a big hit with any of your gluten-sensitive friends. Perhaps the greatest thing about cupcakes though is that they’re kind of self-regulating. Anyone can cut an embarrassingly enormous piece of cake, but cupcakes are pretty standardized, making it easier to limit yourself to just one, which is especially important if you’re worried about your weight this holiday season.
Another reason to make Halloween cupcakes is that in addition to the excessive sugar and dairy candy is loaded with is, there are a bunch of preservatives, flavorings and ingredients that are bad for you, which can easily be avoided in making cupcakes from scratch. So treat your friends and family this year, after all, it’s election season, they’ll be getting tricked enough.
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Photo: ChicagoGeek
