Halloween goodies!

Well, my 3-year-old is totally into Halloween now, so I decided to have a small dress-up party for her and her friends, since I'd be working on the actual day of Halloween. I didn't want to make anything too spooky for preschoolers... so I let the theme be pumpkins, no bloodshot eyes and severed hands.
First, I apologize for the poor photos, the one thing my husband did that day, and he messed up!

Anyway, the cake was this devil's food Halloween cake

from Gourmet magazine. The original recipe has a chocolate spider, its legs extending over the sides of the cake, a really neat idea that I want to try next time. The cake itself was yum, though I wonder if it would have been better with chocolate instead of cocoa powder. I did have another devil food's cake recipe using chocalate from Nick Maglieri's book How to Bake, but my stupid fridge had frozen the sour cream his recipe calls for. Anywho, everyone said they liked the cake, though my 3-year-old was a little freaked out by the orange and black icing. The icing was an amalgam of this quick vanilla buttercream icing I found online and the frosting in the Bon Apetit recipe. I also stuck some of Wilton's Halloween sprinkles along the edges, very unprofessionally.
The cupcakes were plain vanilla, to which I added half a cup of chocolate chips, using the same frosting. This was my first time piping anything, and while the spiders' webs weren't hard, my spiders turned out rather double-jointed and my attempt at a bat was unrecognizable!