Spider-Man themed Desserts!

To say “I’m impressed with how well organized and thought out little kid birthday parties are these days” would be a massive understatement.

First it was Jackie with Aaliyah’s “Moana-themed” birthday party and most recently, I baked desserts for Allyssa’s son Emiliano (a.k.a. Nano) who just turned four. He had a Spider-Man-themed party and holy freakin’ cow, Allyssa turned her backyard into the greatest child’s playground.

Scene:
Spider-Man themed bounce house
Kiddie pool (as it was 100 freakin’ degrees)
Party-goers dressed as super heroes
Spidey decorations on the fences, tables, chairs, walls… legitimately everywhere
And the best part-there’s an actual human version of Spider-Man. I repeat. Spider-Man was at Nano’s birthday party.

Props to you Allyssa-mad props.

Allyssa reached out to me about a month ago asking if I could bake some desserts for her son’s birthday party. Not only is she one of my best friend’s cousins, but Allyssa has such a great heart. So DUH!

Naturally, mom and I immediately got to thinking. Mini cupcakes and a cake. We would make mini chocolate cupcakes and mini white cupcakes. For the cake, Allyssa wanted marble. We used my auntie’s recipe for chocolate cake and we used my grandma’s recipe for the white cake. Family recipes are the best!! And let me tell you, these two cake recipes made such a decedent marble cake. Not too overpowering in the chocolate department and not too bland.

Fun fact about making marble cakes: in your pan, you want to divide the flavors. By creating a virtual “X” in your pan, you’ll drop some of your white batter in the top and bottom part, then you’ll drop some white batter in the remaining left and right areas of the bottom of the pan. Using that same virtual X, switch the colors and add more batter (i.e. – the top and bottom portions will be white batter and the left and right portions will be chocolate batter). For the mixing, you’ll want to use a fork or a wooden spoon and gently make a squiggly line down the center of your pan, constantly making elongated figure S’s. Rotate the pan 90 degrees and do the same to this side of the pan. You don’t want to mix too much, or else the batters will blend too much and won’t turn out marble!

Back to the desserts!

We made a three layer marble cake with super sweet buttercream in between each layer. While I dirty iced the cake (a.k.a. added buttercream to the entire outside of the cake), momma rolled out a TON of red fondant for the exterior of the cake. Ready for the fondant, momma and I gently laid the red fondant all around the cake, smoothed it down, and eliminated any bubbles. And just like that, we had a bright red cake! We wanted to add white spider webs all around the cake. I opted to use white chocolate for the spider webs but quickly after applying the white chocolate, I immediately regretted my decision. Momma told me I should’ve used buttercream for the webs because the chocolate would break when cutting the cake. #rookiemistake

I made some “Spidey eyes” cutouts to place on top of the cake. I colored the outside of the fondant in black edible marker-that really helped the eyes POP.

We also made mini chocolate and mini cupcakes. But before piping on frosting, I filled a bag of melted white chocolate with a number 2 tip. Then I piped about 90 spiderwebs onto wax paper and placed the wax lined baking sheet in the fridge to allow the white chocolate to harden.

At the same time, momma made chocolate spiders, about an inch in size. She used a bag filled with melted milk chocolate and a number 2 tip.

While both the webs and the spiders were solidifying in the fridge, I used the same buttercream that I used for the icing on the cake to frost the cupcakes. Using a number 12 tip, we piped frosting directly in the center of each cupcake.

After we removed the trays from the fridge, we were very gentle in peeling off the white chocolate webs and the chocolate spiders from the wax paper. As we expected, a few of them did end up breaking, but that’s why we made extras!

Because we worked with fragile chocolate/white chocolate, we had to be verrrrry careful when we placed the chocolate into the buttercream frosting! I made sure to insert about a quarter of the spider web towards the back of the top of the cupcake so there was room to gently place the chocolate spider in the front. And just like that, we had two 3D chocolate figures on each mini cupcake!

It’s safe to say everyone at the party went crazy when they saw the cake and the mini cupcakes. Not gonna lie, people were more impressed with the cake (as was I)! I loved the red fondant on the cake, I think that made it. Then the fondant for the eyes, that was everything!! I was really proud of the work that momma and I did for Nano’s party! Not only did it look awesome from the outside, but the marble cake on the inside tasted impeccable!! Family recipes are the way to go, I’m tellin’ ya!