Broken Glass and Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes

Bloody glass cupcakes

One of my guilty pleasures is Martha Stewart's living.  I don't think I've ever done one of her arts and crafts or even made a recipe straight out of there, but I love to look at it anyway.  Her Halloween edition has always been one of my faves.  This year, I saw her broken glass cupcakes and had to emulate it.

Similar to Martha's

I can't find them on her website.  Her website is notoriously hard to navigate.  The article in the magazine (the Halloween edition with "Mothra" on the cover) just had a photo of the cupcakes, and not even a how-to.  I went to the website to find out how she made her sugar glass, but no such luck.  I swear, you can search for the exact recipe title on her website and not find something.  She is pimping a new book on holiday crafts and baking, so maybe it's in there.  Who knows.  This is why I rarely visit the website or make anything she has in her books.  I did a Google image search for Martha Stewart broken glass cupcakes, and the ones pictured to the right look the most like them.  The shards of glass were clear and the "blood" was coming out of the cupcakes.  They're ok, but they don't look gruesome enough for me.

Sugar glass is easy to make, and lots of fun (but it can be dangerous), so I went to town.  Sugar glass is basically just a hard candy, spread out.  Since it's supposed to look jagged and broken for this, it's super easy. I have a low-cal version of a cupcake recipe too, but we'll do to the sugar glass first.   You can make sugar glass just as many ways as you can make sugar candy, so no recipe is incorrect.

Sugar Glass 
3 cups sugar
1 cup water
1 cup clear corn syrup
Red food coloring

You can tell my sugar wasn't heated smoothly,
but dirty glass works for this.

1. Before you start, get everything together.  Sugar glass comes together pretty quickly and once you start pouring, it's over in a second.  If you're making broken glass, get a baking sheet ready (either spray it with some cooking spray or rub it down with some oil or butter).  If you're going to do something more elaborate like a mold or form, get the materials you need ready.  For my prep, I also got the food coloring and a paint brush.  You'll need to spray a spatula and some spoons with some cooking spray too, to help you smooth out the glass.
2. Combine all the ingredients except food coloring (unless you want solid red glass) in a sauce pan and cook on medium heat until the mixture reaches 300 degrees on a candy thermometer.  If you heat the liquid too fast, the sugar won't be as clear but it's not that big of a deal in this prep.
3. Poor the liquid on the prepared surface and quickly spread out. This is the dangerous part.  Remember this sugar is 300 degrees! Don't touch it.  Use your tools to spread it out, but work quickly.
4. While the sugar is still a little wet, splash or paint the red coloring on to resemble blood drops. You should have the "glass" spread out and painted within a few minutes.
5. Let cool.
6. Crack into shards (this is the fun part).
7. Decorate as you wish.

Easy Vegan Cupcakes
Let's talk about doctoring up a cake mix.  For these, I used a whole can of pumpkin in a chocolate cake mix instead of the oil, water and eggs. So, you just take the dry cake mix, mix in the pumpkin and bake.  People love it, and it's an easy way to make a cake mix vegan.  Just make sure your cake mix is vegan.  Most are. Store bought icings are mostly vegan too, but read the label.  Let's be honest, these mixes and icings aren't animal or vegetable foodstuffs.  They're mostly fakey fakey processed ingredients and oils. But enjoying them every now and again won't kill you, just don't eat the whole dozen yourself.  

I think I stole the pumpkin idea from Hungry Girl (I saw it on a talk show), but it tastes better to me than a regular cake mix anyway.  It only works well with chocolate cake mixes.  You can barely taste the pumpkin in a chocolate cake mix.  Pumpkin and chocolate go well together anyway.  If you use pumpkin in a white cake mix, you'll have pumpkin cake.  It's good too, but people can tell it's pumpkin.  In chocolate, I normally get, "This tastes like something, but what is it?" 

According to Hungry Girl one cupcake made this way has 181 calories, 3.5g fat, 37g carbs (eep), 2g fiber and 2g protein.  I just think they taste better that way (they seem to be richer).  

You can make a homemade cake and icing and decorate it too, but I'm going to be honest again here.  If I'm going to make a cupcake for kids or people who I know will care more about the decoration and icing than the cake, I'm not going to go to all the effort of making the cake taste like the best cake ever.  It's like the time I slaved over a stove for hours making homemade pasta sauce one week, got rave reviews.  A few weeks later, I didn't have time so I brought in Prego ... also got the rave reviews.  Seriously, most people don't care, and if the cake is a box cake, I'm less likely to eat it all.

I'll have some healthy food next week, and maybe some unhealthy ones too. I'm thinking about making more Halloween treats.  I have several Halloween events to go to, and sometimes I like to bring snacks.  We'll see.