I like cupcakes. They’re easy to make, easier than a cake to decorate, and if you get an assembly line going you can turn out a lot of them with relatively little effort. It’s fairly easy to find Halloween-themed cupcakes for kids, but here are a few that would also work well for an adult party.

The ones pictured above are “Murdered Cupcakes” by Craftster user Lethargic, featuring knives cleverly made out of tinted white chocolate. If you don’t feel up to making the knives, you could probably find plastic ones meant for dollhouse kitchens.

A couple that I’ve mentioned previously include cupcakes decorated as spiders and jam-filled vampire bites.

Three from Epicurious: brains (perfect for a zombie-themed party), eyeballs, and bleeding hearts (I love the “anatomical” look of these).

Wilton tends to feature designs that require their line of decorating accessories, so it always seems as though they’re a little too hard. However, these ghosts would be creepy even without the arms and legs, and this other ghost design is easy and would be effective with other “heads” besides the pumpkin. I also like the cauldrons (sans ghost), and I’m really quite taken with their “Webbed Feat” cupcake platter.

As usual, Martha Stewart knocks it out of the park with Ghosts and a variety of Creepcakes (I adore the little tentacled one).

These spiderwebs and spirals are pretty and easy.

If you aren’t afraid to work with fondant, check out these two from Flickr: witches and midnight blooms. And if you’re completely hopeless at decorating, make tombstones out of cookies: These look quite effective massed on a plate, especially if you put a little candy pumpkin or other decoration beside each tombstone.

Rats. Now I’m all hungry.

Update: A couple of days before this post was scheduled to go up, Wedding Skulls did a cupcake roundup of her own. Go check out her awesome finds as well!