First off, I need to point out that I can bake- and I mean from scratch. Need a cake? Brownies? Cookies or cupcakes? I got that. And my rum balls will put you right on your butt.

Based on that experience, I decided to take on one of the Squidoo challenges- to make a lens on Halloween cupcakes. Starting with the assumption that most people were going to  focus on the decorations, I went a different way: I’d make the centerpiece of the project a game.

Off I went to the craft store to get little trinkets to put inside the cupcakes, and figured on making each like a door prize. If you got an eyeball, you’d get  toy#1, a bat would get toy#2, etc.

Even as I started to try to pull things together, Bianca knew that this was not going to end well:

   I’ll admit that  I went overboard – surprise! Michaels is a dangerous place. I even bought a mold to make skeleton body parts and filled them with the green and orange chocolate (front and center of the photo). Did I mention I’d never worked with that stuff before? Yeah. Harder than it looks.

I cheated and used a box mix so I could focus on the ‘fun’ stuff. Got fancy, divided it up into batches and used food dye in Halloween-y colors, and based on my Pinterest research decided to use ice cream cones instead of standard paper cups. After wrapping the toys in mini baking cups and carefully pushing them to the bottom of the cones I was ready to fill ’em up and go!

  They looked a little different coming out of the oven than they did going in:

Let us count the ways that this went wrong. First off, the purple batter cooked up brown, so the cones with the overflowing brown looks like…well…like it needed a plunger. The cones sort of melted under the lava-like heat of cake batter, collapsing in, and forming those lovely goiter-like protrusions. Oh, and the batter just oozed inside the toys, rendering them revolting.

I was ready to throw in the towel when a friend pointed out that “anything can be fixed with frosting!” Yup!