i only have eyes for you....

So, for my birthday a sweet friend got me an amazing book of Zombie cupcakes.  The cupcakes looked impressive, if a little daunting.  They called for supplies like gum paste, which I had never used before.  But her boyfriend wanted to make the bloody eyeball cupcakes for his co-workers, so I decided to give it a go. 

I started by baking brown sugar pound cake cupcakes, dyed pink, and while they were still warm, making thumbprints to function as eyesockets. 

Then we rolled dyed some white fondant a few different colours, rolled it out and then cut out circles to cover the sockets.

We mixed white fondant and gum paste and made eyeballs.  They didn't look like eyeballs, so much an as image from a junior high health class text book.....

We made more half and half and dyed it black to make eyebrows (well, it was going to be brown, but following the directions we added a drop of black  food colouring and it turned gray....and no one wants to eat grandpa's eyeballs, so we added more black).

Blue half and half was rolled out to make irises (punched out with the wide end of an icing tip), black half-and-half for the pupils (punched out with the smaller end):

With a red edible ink pen, we drew veins onto the eyeballs.  We mixed red food colouring and piping gel to make blood that we used to fill the eyesockets.