Halloween Oreo cupcakes: five designs from one frosting

Mix the eggs with the sugar and the vanilla paste, then add the milk and the melted butter. Everything liquid goes into one Bowl. Sieve the flour, cocoa, Baking powder and salt into a second one. Sieving isn't just a formality with cocoa: it clumps, and the lumps no longer dissolve in the batter.

Add the dry to the wet and stir only until no more flour is visible. It doesn't need longer, quite the opposite: the more you stir, the tougher the cupcake becomes.

Place a whole Oreo in each case: flat, with the filling facing up. On top, two scoops of batter until the case is about two thirds full. No higher: the batter rises, and an overflowed cupcake can't be decorated cleanly.

Bake the cupcakes at 170 °C fan for 16 minutes. Do the skewer test in the centre: the Oreo at the base stays soft, that's how it should be. Then let them cool completely: any frosting melts away on a lukewarm cupcake.

Beat butter and Fondant well with the paddle attachment until the mixture is pale and airy. The Fondant needs this time: it's firm to begin with and only turns smooth through the beating.

Only now add the cream cheese and just briefly stir it in. Beating it too long makes it runny, and a runny frosting holds no shape, certainly not the bandages of a mummy.

Cut everything first, then decorate: with frosting on your fingers, cutting gets fiddly. You will need:
- Gravestone: trim a whole Oreo straight on the sides so it becomes square instead of round. Keep the offcuts, they will become the bat's ears.
- Bat: open up an Oreo. The half with the thin layer of filling is the body, the other half you break into two pieces for the wings.
- Crumbs: crumble five Oreos, they go into the frosting and onto the grave later.

First spread a thin layer of plain white frosting over the whole cupcake, it is only the glue. Then dip the cupcake upside down into the Oreo crumbs until the surface is darkly covered. Only now come the bandages: pipe the white frosting over it criss-cross, horizontal, vertical, feel free to keep it irregular. It is exactly that messiness that makes the mummy, and the dark base lets every band stand out. To finish, set two Candy eyes into a gap.

Pipe a tall swirl of white frosting and stand the cupcake upside down on baking paper. This way the Dome comes out flat and even, something you cannot manage by hand. Lift off carefully, then paint on eyes, nose and mouth with dark Cake icing.

From here on the white frosting turns into an Oreo frosting: stir in the crumbs. Before this you must have done everything that needs pure white, there is no going back.

Pipe a swirl of Oreo frosting. Lay the Oreo half with the thin layer of filling flat as the body, and stick the two broken pieces in at the sides as wings. Halve the offcuts from the gravestone and set them on top as ears. To finish, glue on two eyes with a dab of Cake icing.

The order matters here: first pipe the legs directly onto the frosting with dark cake icing, and only then place the Oreo on top as the body. If you do it the other way round, you can no longer get the piping nozzle under the biscuit. Attach the eyes to the Oreo with a dab of icing.

Stir cocoa and more crumbs into the rest of the frosting until it is an earthy brown. Pipe it on and sprinkle with Oreo crumbs: that is the soil. Push the square-cut Oreo in upright and write «R.I.P.» on it with white cake icing. For such fine lettering, melt the icing and fill it into a paper cone: it comes out too thick from a normal piping nozzle.