Halloween Spider Bundt

It's time to let the creepy crawlies in on the fun! Every year King Arthur Flour bloggers MJ and Gwen get together to play around in the kitchen, creating spooky cute creations for Halloween. This year's winner takes the cake — literally! Halloween Spider Bundt cakes are beyond easy, and so much fun for both kids and adults to create. Let us show you how —

Halloween Spider Bundt Cake is scary simple! Get started:

All you need is a chocolate or vanilla Bundt cake, baked in our Party Bundt Pan. Or bake both!

We've baked Chocolate Fudge Bundt Cake and Golden Vanilla Pound Cake, both in full-size 10-cup Bundt pans. Start checking them after they've baked for 50 minutes; they're done when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Note: Before baking, remove 1/4 cup of the batter and bake it in a muffin pan to create a separate cupcake. You'll see why later.

Choose your frosting

Our frosting of choice is Easy Vanilla Buttercream Frosting, which will easily frost two cakes. For chocolate frosting, split your batch of vanilla frosting in half, and add 1/4 cup (21g) Dutch-process cocoa plus 1/4 cup (21g) black cocoa to one half, mixing well. BAM. Instant chocolate frosting!

Round up the candy

Your spider needs some features! The following are good choices:

• Colorful chocolate candies
• Candy corn, for the fangs
• Licorice shoe strings, also for the fangs and equally spooky
• Large red cinnamon candies

Other helpful tools:

• Piping bags and tips; we used a Wilton 1A tip, which we found made the perfect sized spider legs, but feel free to use your favorite large mouthed tip
• Toothpicks
  

Assemble the spider's body

Take the separately baked cupcake and insert it into the center of the Bundt, creating the body of the spider. If you'd rather fill the middle of the cake with ALL frosting (the more frosting, the better, right!?), follow the directions in the recipe for increasing the amount.

Pipe the top of the cupcake with frosting, to make the body of the spider.

At this point, be sure to have your cake on the plate you intend to serve it on. Once the legs are in place, it can no longer be moved without damage.

Pipe the legs

Using the toothpicks, lay out where you intend to pipe the spider's legs. We left three cake columns free for the face, and left two columns between each leg.

Starting from the top, slowly and smoothly pipe the frosting up and down to the bottom. Twisting your arm to the side as you travel down, keeping your arm flat instead of straight up, will prevent the tip from flattening and keep your frosting legs nice and round. Be sure to leave a nice blob at the bottom, for the feet. Remember to remove the toothpicks one at a time before piping.

Add the face

Now for the fun of decorating! We styled our two Halloween Spider Bundt cakes differently, placing the face on the front of the cake for our chocolate spider, and on top for the vanilla one. Choose whichever you prefer, or make up your own style face.

To attach candies to the front of the cake, pipe about a teaspoon of icing in between the column in the center of the front (left photo, above).

Angle the eye candy (pun intended) to create the expression you'd like. We decided that turning the oval M&M's slightly gave our spider a mildly sinister look, but nothing too scary.

Press the candy into the soft icing and hold for just a moment to let it settle. Repeat with the fangs. By altering the angle of the candy corn fangs, we softened the expression just a bit, keeping our spider from looking too deadly.

For the vanilla spider we chose large red cinnamon candies to really pop against the white icing. Bright traditional candy corn pushed lightly into the feet made excellent toenail claws. With all the unusual candy corn flavors out these days, you could really jazz up eight little feet easily!

Admire your Halloween Spider Bundt!

At last, Halloween treats you can feel really good about serving. Fresh ingredients, wonderful flavors, and guaranteed to bring a smile to even your scariest trick-or-treaters. We hope you have a blast baking up and decorating your Halloween Spider Bundt. Post your pictures to Instagram using #kingarthurflour. We'd love to see them!