Cupcakes, Bloody Cupcakes

Sugar skulls for Mexico's Day of the Dead

Call me old-fashioned, but do we really have to start thinking about Halloween already? I mean, yes it’s October now, but I was finding candy corns and Hershey miniatures right next to my back-to-school supplies. Pretty soon, they’ll be sold with your Fourth of July firecrackers.

But at least the early warning gives you plenty of time to plan. Americans aren’t alone in their fascination with ghoulish confections. Chocolate coffins, sugary bread shaped like bones, and skulls of molded sugar are traditional fare for Mexico’s Day of the Dead, which comes right after Halloween. Sugar skulls are the most famous of the treats, made or purchased by every household and stacked into colorful mounds on street carts. In Britain, London-based baker Lily Jones, aka: Lily Vanilli, churns out cupcakes with coconut-jelly eyeballs and cakes modeled after human heads, saying that the merger of the sublime (the taste) and the grotesque (the design) is just part of being human.

“There’s a fascination with horror,” she told me in an interview last year. “It’s just imagination, something out of the ordinary. There’s a lot of beauty in it too, in the strange and the unusual.”

Recipes for her grotesque cupcakes are collected in her book “A Zombie Ate My Cupcake.”

But for a less ghoulish, more wholesome cupcake, try Martha Stewart, the never-fail go-to for spiffing up basic recipes. She’s got bats and spiders and brains like the rest of them, but somehow there is merely the suggestion of grossness – not an actual pool of fake blood that puts you off your treat. Her Wicked Witch cupcakes are about as far as I want to go.