A Zombie Ate My Cupcake!: 25 Deliciously Weird Cupcake Recipes for Halloween and Other Spooky Occasions

With 25 killer cupcake recipes, Lily Vanilli will teach you how to bake and decorate some frighteningly good cakes!

With 25 killer cupcake recipes, Lily Vanilli will teach you how to bake and decorate some frighteningly good cakes!

After being banished for so long to the land of the pretty and identical, the domestic and the twee, cupcakes are biting back. Here, Lily Vanilli shows how you can take inspiration from anywhere--insects, roadkill, zombies--and recreate it in cake, with a delicious result. Get creative with your tasty toppings, edible sculptures, and natural ingredients with this introduction to making cakes look weird, ugly and perfect for Halloween. Give guests a shock with revoltingly realistic Marzipan Beetles, or add a crunch to your desserts with Morbid Meringue Bones, dipped in raspberry blood sauce. Try out a black cherry Dracula’s Bite red velvet cupcake with cream cheese, a heavenly Fallen Angel Cake, or go for the indulgent and truly dark chocolate Devil’s Delight Cupcakes.

Lily Vanilli, aka Lily Jones, is a baker and cake designer. Originally a graphic designer, she began baking as a hobby and then started selling her cakes at Swanfield market near Brick Lane. Now she has a bakery on London’s Columbia Road and consults for bakeries and brands all around the world. Lily is known for her unusual recipes--she experiments with savory ingredients such as avocado and bacon--and for her spectacular designs, such as the marzipan insects she made for an Alexander McQueen film project, the blood and gore cupcakes created for Maaike Meeking’s show at London Fashion Week, and the fabulous treats devised for Thomasina Miers’s incredible Day of the Dead festival. Lily has been hugely successful, has written two books, and has her own brand of light wheat beer. She is based in London, UK.