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. Sift the flour, cocoa, Baking powder and salt into a second one. Sifting isn't just a formality with cocoa: it clumps, and the lumps won't dissolve in the batter afterwards.

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

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 no longer 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: on a lukewarm cupcake any frosting melts away.

Beat the butter and Fondant well with the paddle-attachment bowl until the mixture is pale and airy. The Fondant needs this time — it's firm at the start and only becomes smooth through beating.

Only now add the cream cheese and stir it in briefly. Beating too long makes it runny — and a runny frosting won't hold its shape, least of all the bandages of a mummy.

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

First spread a thin layer of plain white frosting over the whole cupcake — it's just 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 every which way — horizontal, vertical, feel free to be irregular. It's exactly this messiness that makes the mummy, and the dark base makes every bandage stand out. To finish, place two Candy eyes in a gap.

Pipe a tall swirl of white frosting and place the cupcake upside down on baking paper. This makes the dome flat and even — you can't achieve that by hand. Lift it off carefully, then paint on eyes, nose and mouth with dark Cake icing.

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

Pipe a swirl of Oreo frosting. Lay the Oreo half with the thin layer of filling flat as the body, and push the two broken pieces in at the sides as wings. Halve the offcuts from the gravestone and set them on top as ears. Finally, stick 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 underneath the biscuit. Stick the eyes onto 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, sprinkle with Oreo crumbs — that's the soil. Stick the Oreo cut into a square shape upright into it 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: from a normal Piping nozzle it comes out too thick.