My daughter requested Spider-Man cupcakes for her preschool birthday party though you can certainly make Spider-Man cupcakes for an adult party, too.
With her birthday adjacent to Easter celebrations, I needed an easy design. Normally, I would have practiced and researched but there simply wasn’t time.
For the preschool set, these Spider-Man cupcakes were good enough and easy to make.
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Materials for Spider-Man Cupcakes
This is what you will need to make Spider-Man cupcakes.
- Cupcake liners: You can buy Spider-Man baking cups, however, plain blue baking cups or cupcake liners would look neat too.
- Cupcakes: We opted for vanilla cupcakes but any cupcake flavor will do.
- Red Frosting: A pure red frosting is extremely difficult to create so feel good about settling for an orange-red. Or, you can buy pre-made red buttercream frosting.
- Black Frosting: This is also extremely difficult to make. I used a black Wilton Sparkle Gel which was a serious time saver. One tube was enough for 24 cupcakes and there was some left over. To make you feel better about buying black icing, I took a Wilton cake decorating class and the teacher always bought her black icing for decorating purposes. You can also make a chocolate frosting and then add in black food coloring to darken it a little.
- Sugar sheet (or white frosting): Plain white frosting works, but in real life cutting Spider-Man’s eyes out of a white Wilton Sugar Sheet looks better and is much easier.
- Black food marker: Use this for drawing eyes on the Spider-Man cupcakes. I am always surprised by how much I use a black food marker for various food-related crafts.
- Scissors: For cutting the sugar sheets.
Spider-Man Cupcake Directions
1. Draw the eyes on the sugar sheet with the black food marker. Let me tell you that we had quite a dilemma about how big and what shape Spider-Man’s eyes should be. My husband launched into why Spider-Man’s eyes are different shapes in certain cartoons, in case you were curious.
In the end, we couldn’t decide so you’ll see down below that our cupcakes have eyes of various shapes. Go with a shape you like at about 1″ long.
Remove the plastic back from the sugar sheet and fold it in half (don’t leave it this way for long as it will stick). This way you can cut two eyes at once. Separate the eyes and flip one over to get identical, opposing eyes. Or, whatever that’s called.
2. Frost the cupcakes with red frosting.
3. Take black frosting and make one line across. Make two lines from center to edge, like so.
The sparkle gel is so gel-like that there’s no real need for a totally steady hand (or perhaps that’s because I was making these for 5-year-olds). Squeeze lightly and drape it across the cupcake. You could make a cross and then fill in with other diagonal lines. This looks a little bit cluttered in my opinion.
4. Finish the other side and then loop frosting between the lines to complete the web. It looks better if you start slightly above where the lines finish.
5. Place the eyes. I tried to nestle one side up against and slightly under a black line.
6. Outline each eye with black frosting. We tried coloring with the food marker but it didn’t look right as it was a lighter black than the gel. Don’t skip this part (like some other people on the internet). Spider-Man doesn’t look like Spider-Man without the black outline around his eyes. Kids will notice.
Wilton also makes a cute cardboard Spider-Man cupcake stand that I saw at Michael’s.
That’s it! I was so rushed, I only have this Instagram photo of all of them.
The Spider-Man cupcakes were a hit at school, I’m told. Now you know how to make Spider-Man cupcakes, too.
Katie Dillon
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