Halloweeny Cakey Blog!

Now this is far more my style.

Several years ago I was at a garage sale and found a set of skull cake pans.

I had to have them. They were just too fun to pass up. Well they sat in a box for the next few years. But when I came up with an idea on how to ice them a few days ago, I decided to give them a try.

Because I wanted to make them edible, I decided to use my favorite chocolate cake recipe. This recipe makes two very big layers or four smaller layers. The skull pans are kind of small so I decided to make cupcakes with the leftover batter. The very cupcakes mentioned in the previous blog that hit the ground! Thank goodness it wasn't all of them though. I did keep about 10 at home, which Nick ended up taking to work. Aren't they cute!?



So, skull cakes. I used Crisco cooking spray on the pans and that was a mistake. The cakes stuck to the pan and basically were ruined.



Poor skull on the right totally had his face eaten off. The one on the left was OK... but still not great. If I had some actual talent I could have made this a zombie cake with it's face eaten off, but I really had no idea how to pull that off. And I still wanted to implement the idea I had so I baked another cake. I didn't use the original recipe though because I didn't have all the necessary ingredients now. Instead I made a mayonnaise cake because I did have all the ingredients for it. And this time I buttered and floured my cake pans. I melt the butter and brush the pans with a pastry brush, and then sprinkle the pans with flour. I'm not taking any chances for another sticking disaster!

It worked! The cakes came out of the pan perfectly and all the detail was showing. So here's my idea. I would cover the cakes with a white chocolate ganache (12 oz white chocolate, 1/2 cup of heavy cream - heat cream, pour over white chocolate, let set for 3 minutes, whisk until all the chocolate is melted, stir in Tablespoons of softened unsalted butter until smooth). While the ganache was still warm, but not hot, pour it over the cakes so it makes a glaze, covering the cakes in white chocolate.



Refrigerate and let the ganache set. Then, using a store bought black icing, because black is just too hard to make, fill in the detail. I started with the eyes.


From there I did the mouth. To do the mouth I squirted some of the icing out into a bowl and used a toothpick to fill in the teeth.


I don't have the steadiest hand, but I was honestly quite impressed that I did this well!

I contemplated not filling in the nose, but it looks a bit too much like an alien without the nose so I went ahead and did the nose too. But honestly, if you make green icing, this would be a pretty good alien.



Happy Halloween Everyone!!!! Oh and don't worry about the skull cakes that stuck to their pans. See all that ganache glaze in the bottom of the pan above? That was salvaged and gets melted down and poured over delicious hunks of chocolate cake. YUM.