Most cooks, no matter how competent, have a culinary area of darkness. It might be cooking fish (a common one) or making pastry. Mine is cupcakes.

It isn’t just that my cupcakes aren’t great, which I could accept - not happily, but I could accept. It is rather that they are truly, truly terrible. I use recipes and yet the batter is always the wrong consistency, they have a nasty aftertaste or the icing is literally inedible.

I’m not the best baker in the world but I can turn out a decent tart, banana bread or muffin but the cupcake, it seems, is beyond me.

It had been a while since I’d approached my nemesis, long enough for the memory of the last cupcake #fail to subside - it involved too much lavender and lumpy curdled butter - don’t ask! Halloween and a horror film night at some friends’ seemed like the perfect opportunity to make some ghoulish cakes.

I settled on a recipe for red velvet cupcakes, a slightly frightening vivid red cake from the American deep south, these I’d decorate with creamy icing, laced with trickles of blood (food colouring) to make vampire cupcakes.

They should have been dramatically red but also light and fluffy, mine were meaty pink (honestly, look at the photo) and rock dense, the batter really more of a dough…

They did rise but in a horribly deformed fashion, looking to all the world like I had made them from finely minced and kneaded meat. They tasted really floury and the icing was too liquid and poured into all the crags and over the sides!

Checking recipes online I now realise that while the recipe I had advocated 2.5 cups flour to 1 cup buttermilk and I had converted that to 550g flour to 100ml buttermilk, that is about twice as much flour as I should have used, oops! Still don’t know what went wrong with the icing, tasted lovely, just poured like double cream…

There was also to be some bloody popcorn (popcorn covered in dyed red melted butter), now I think it’s going to be some Halloween chocs and regular chips and dips - not even home made as I spent all yesterday evening on baking the meat cupcakes…

I thought I would share, as a word of warning about careful US to conversions (cupcakes should be about 2 parts flour to 1 part liquid) and also because it is always good to know that we all suffer bad cooking days.

Plus, they are so awful I thought you might enjoy a giggle!

Happy Halloween.