Halloween Spiderweb Cake with Spooky Candy Spiders

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Let’s celebrate Halloween with a fun treat!

This cute Halloween spiderweb cake is easy to make and delicious to eat! My kids absolutely love celebrating holidays. They also enjoy baking with me and devouring the treats we create. This project combines both celebrating Halloween and baking. Small children can help you make this recipe and older children can easily make this cake on their own. I will offer up plenty of options so you can make this cake perfect for your family.

The first step is baking the cake.

I am a busy mother, so I just bought a cake mix at the store. My kids actually prefer cakes from a mix to homemade versions anyway. If your kids are more appreciative of your baking skills or if you’re just in the baking mood, feel free to go ahead and make a cake from scratch. It doesn’t really matter what flavor you use. This is a good time to let your kids pick out the flavor!

cakes on a cooling rack: first step in making a spiderweb cake.

I baked my cakes in two round pans, but if you don’t have those, you can make any shape cake you want. Cupcakes are also an option. Just follow the directions on the cake box. Easy! If you want to get fancy, you can always add some food coloring to white cake batter. Orange and purple are my favorite colors for a Halloween cake. If you want to get extra fancy, divide the batter in half and dye each half a different color. If you happen to have sprinkles on hand, you can throw those into the batter instead. Your children will be impressed by any of these options.

The next step is to frost the cake.

The most important part of frosting a cake is to let the cake cool first! Do not let your impatient children convince you to frost your cake too early, or the icing will melt and the top layer of your cake will slide right off the bottom layer. I am speaking from experience.

Once again, I was lazy and just picked up a can of frosting at the grocery store. I even found a can that was already orange so I didn’t have to add any food coloring. You can choose any flavor and color of frosting that you want. If you want to get fancy, you can always make your own icing from scratch or even cover the cake in fondant if you are feeling more ambitious. My kids only care about eating the cake, so I just slapped some icing on the cake quickly and didn’t worry too much about what it looked like. Save a tiny bit of your icing to use for your decorations.

The final step is to decorate the spiderweb cake. This is where you can really have some fun!

My plan for the spiderweb design was to use some pull-apart black licorice. However, the grocery store didn’t have any and I didn’t feel like driving around to multiple stores. Instead, I bought regular black licorice and just cut each piece in half lengthwise, so the strips would be narrower and easier to work with. If you have a steadier hand than I do, you can always just make the spiderweb lines out of icing, using a piping bag. Feel free to experiment with different types of candy, too. I would recommend using a light colored candy with a dark icing and vice versa.

spiderweb Halloween cake

Follow along with my picture to design your spiderweb. I put one long piece of licorice down the center of the cake and then added two shorter pieces to each side to divide the cake into six sections. My lines weren’t perfectly symmetrical, but it still looked fine, so don’t worry about it too much! After that, I added small strips of licorice between the lines in a U shape. I added one row close to the center and one row further out toward the edge. As always, you can feel free to create your own design if you don’t want to follow mine.

The final piece of this cake is a cute little candy spider.

Since I have two kids, I made two spiders so they could each get one. It was quicker to make an extra spider than to referee a giant fight. My original plan was to use a black gumdrop for the spider body, but the grocery store didn’t happen to have any of those. You can always use a different color of gumdrop. I ended up buying a bag of peppermint patties for the spider bodies, mostly because I want to eat all the leftover candies. Feel free to use whatever candy you like best.

candy spider on a cake

I added two small dollops of icing to the peppermint patties and stuck a chocolate chip on each dollop to make eyes. I placed the spider body on the cake. Then I cut short strips of licorice into four pieces lengthwise to make skinny little strips for the spider legs. I poked four little strips under each side of the spider bodies, so that each spider had eight legs. You could also make the legs with icing if you aren’t using licorice.

Admire your Halloween spiderweb cake quickly because everyone will want to eat a piece right away!

spiderweb cake

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