Everywhere Game of Thrones fans are eagerly awaiting the premiere of the eighth and last season of the HBO fantasy series. You may even be throwing a watching party (I know of a few happening!), but are you prepared? Besides the typical snack foods, do you have themed cupcakes to serve your amazed guests?

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NOW YOU DO!

The following are our top three Game of Throne cupcakes with a beastly theme: white walkers, dragons, and wolves, OH MY. We have them organized by the easiest (white walkers) to the hardest (wolves). Feel free to try all three or pick your favorite and do just that one. Before we get started with the decorating, though, we have a few tips to make things simpler and more affordable for you.

Photos by Courtney Langdon

Ingredients

All of the ingredients we used are cheap and easy to find, which means you don’t have to worry about sourcing some exotic dye or fondant that could cost an arm and a leg and take a month to be shipped to you. For the cupcakes themselves, we stuck with the traditional options: chocolate and vanilla. We even used store-brand because, hey, parties are expensive and most people won’t know the difference between generic cupcakes and gourmet cupcakes.

If you want to up your cake batter, there are things you can add in moderation, such as the following:

• Flavored syrup, like caramel sauce
• Pudding mixes (one packet of dry pudding mix to one box of cake mix)
• Seasonings, like vanilla or mint
• Candies, especially chocolate ones

NOTE: Like your high school chemistry teacher told you, adding any extra variable to the formula could change the outcome. This means that, if you do add one of the above, you’ll need to keep a closer eye on the cupcakes for the baking time. A teaspoon of vanilla probably won’t change things, but pudding mix and more than a tablespoon of anything may mean a longer baking time and more babysitting the cupcakes while they bake.

Cupcake Liners

When you get ready to bake, don’t forget that your cupcake liners can make a statement, too! While you can buy thematic cupcake liners, just remember that using plain colors to go with the theme work just as well and cost less. (Nobody is going to be staring at the picture on the bottom of the cupcake, trust me.) Also, expect the colors of the liners to darken after baking, especially if you’re making chocolate cupcakes. If you want to keep the colors true, add a second liner to the cupcake *after* it’s done baking, like an overskirt to your underskirt.

Cupcake Decorations

Before we get into the individual designs, I want to give a huge shout-out for all the inspired ideas and tips to an awesome book called “Make It Easy, Cupcake!” by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. I’ve always loved decorating cupcakes, but this book changed my life by showing how to do amazing decorations using store-bought candies, cookies, etc. Now that is my definition of affordable and easy! Both the dragon and wolf cupcakes were based on their designs with notes of where I had to modify it. Check out the book for more great looks like robots, flowers, trucks, and animals of all kinds. Totes adorbs!

White Walker Cupcake

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Step 1: Eyeball Design

This is the only design not modified from the book, because, hey, eyeballs. I decided a white walker eyeball would be the simplest and creepiest way to give that impression of Game of Thrones’s personal zombie horde. The trickiest part of this cupcake is finding a vibrant enough blue for the eyeball. I looked at three different kinds of candies for this: Fruit Roll-Ups, Sour Punch Straws, and Airheads.

The winner? Blue raspberry Airheads! You can see these as the bottom candy in the following picture. Once you’ve used a rolling pin to roll them out and flatten them a bit, you can use a bottle cap (this is one off a vitamin bottle) for your template. Then use a sharp knife to trace around it for your eye.

TIP: If the candy is too tough to flatten, you can put it in the microwave for five seconds to soften it, but no more than that or it will melt and be useless.

Step 2: Ice Your Cupcake

Next ice your cupcake with vanilla icing, as the white background will help make the blue as bright as it can be. The great thing about icing / frosting – other than the taste, of course – is that it works like your glue when creating cupcake designs. Need something to stick? Apply a little frosting and mash!

Step 3: Lay the blue candy circle on top of your cupcake

You’ll also need to pick out your pupil at this time, which should be something black and round. I had no idea it would be so difficult finding black sweets, OMG. You can use a mini Oreo, which I have shown in the first picture, or a dark brown M&M which is in the second picture. Smear a small bit of icing on the back and stick it to the middle of the blue circle.

If you want to add some more realism, you can take a toothpick and chocolate icing and draw some veins on the eye to give it an eerie eyeball look. Make sure you make your veins wavy, though. I made mine too straight and it looks more like a strange radar. *sigh*

Dragon Cupcake

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I hope you didn’t put your rolling pin away, because you’re going to need it for this one, too. The dragon design here was inspired by Make It Easy Cupcake!’s “Dragonflies” design. Your ingredients for this one will be a chocolate-covered fruit or nut for the body – we used Raisinets because they cut well – and Fruit Roll-Ups for the wings. I also tinted some vanilla icing with blue dye to make the cupcake look like a sky the dragon was flying through.

Step 1: Cut a few Raisinets in half

Keep some Raisinets whole. You’ll lay out the body on your cupcake as a whole one for the head, a whole one for the body immediately after the head, and halves for the tail swinging away from the body. It will look a bit like a snake when you’re done.

Step 2: Flatten the Fruit Roll-Up

Next use your rolling pin to flatten the Fruit Roll-Up. It actually looks better if you have folded it so random lines are going through it, as it resembles veins and gives texture. Then use a knife and small cookie cutters to cut out the silhouette of a wing. Repeat for the second wing.

Step 3: Lay the wings on either side of the body

Let the wings draper. Because we want our dragons to fly, not droop, apply a toothpick horizontally into the cupcake under each wing to prop it up.

Look at that dragon soar!

Direwolf Cupcake

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This design is a modified version of Make It Easy, Cupcake!’s “Monster Mouths” and is the trickiest – but also best-looking – design for our Game of Thrones cupcakes. For this, you’ll need the marshmallows (mini and regular) for the teeth, a chocolate caramel or black gumdrop for the nose, and either red icing or a Fruit Roll-Up for the mouth. The book uses a banana Runt for the canines, but I couldn’t find any at the store and used a cut peach gummy instead.

Step 1: Make the Teeth

To make the teeth, the book tells you to use a combination of whole mini marshmallows, mini marshmallows cut on the diagonal for small fangs, and regular marshmallows’ side cuts for the larger fangs.

Step 2: Cut the nose part

You can also go ahead and get your nose ready by using a small cookie cutter / metal straw / pen cap / etc. to cut semi-circles out of the bottom side of the square.

Step 3: Form the mouth

Now that your pieces are ready, put on the mouth (use icing to stick on the Fruit Roll-Up if you went that way) and attach the teeth with icing, making sure they go over the edges of the red but still leave red showing between the rows.

It should be two whole minis on the top and three whole minis on the bottom, two large fangs on the top, and two small fangs on the bottom.

Step 4: Put your icing in a Ziploc bag

Snip a small hole at one corner. This will be your piping bag for applying the icing “fur.”

Step 5: Form the ‘fur’ around the teeth

Place the tip of the bag under the teeth, squeeze slightly, and then let go and pull alway. This will make your icing trail off into a tip. Repeat along the bottom of the teeth, adding a second layer on top of the first if you need to make it fuller.

Continue piping around the cupcake by piping rows above the teeth, too.

Step 6: Add the nose on top

Finish off with placing the nose at the top and adding your yellow fangs on the teeth for effect. Voila!

Enjoy these Game of Thrones cupcakes for your watch party! Share photos of your DIY cupcakes on Twitter @GeekGalsCo.

Featured image credit: Courtney Langdon/Geek Gals