Saturday 29 October 2011

Happy Halloween



I'm back!!

I have been head down, bum up working very hard creating Halloween Magic.  Halloween is crazy at my place.  While its not very big in Australia in general, a little haven of Halloween insanity finds its way to my house every year.

It all started about 4 years ago when my sister who lives in Chicago sent a massive box of Halloween stuff to us for my Son when he was about 3 yrs old.  Wondering what on earth I was going to do with it, I decided to throw a party for his Kindergarten pals and hence a tradition was born.  Every year it has gotten bigger and better.  This was our fourth year.  We now include a haunted room complete with scenes on the walls, spooky masks, sound effects, fog machine etc.

No Halloween party would be complete without a gruesome cake.  I have included here for you both last year's and this year's creations.

Last year I created a copy of the Bleeding Eyeball cake which was in effect, two cakes.  Both plain butter cakes and covered in rolled fondant icing.  The fingers were modeled out of fondant also.  Ironically we never got to eat this cake actually on the day of the party.  We forgot to cut it in all the excitement.  My nephew however has his birthday on the 31st of October and last year it was his 18th - so I gave him the cake as a gift and he took it to school to share with his class.

This year I was looking for something that might take a little less time to create but would still make a big impact.  Thats where the hand out of the ground came from.  I found a great picture of a cake and copied it.  Using a basic Gluten Free Mud Cake recipe for the cake and modeling the fingers for the hand out of Marzipan as opposed to rolled fondant.  White fondant would have been too starkly white and the marzipan gave just the right kind of deathly pallor I was looking for.  The fingernails were also made from marzipan.  The dirt on both the cake and on the fingers and under nails is made from crushed Oreo Cookies which is just the perfect shade of dark dark brown and the consistency perfect.

The Chocolate mud cake was dusted with cocoa powder then the fingers were positioned.  I held them in place overnight with toothpicks and removed them just before the guests arrived to ensure nothing fell over.

I already have another very detailed creation underway for a friend and its going to be spectacular - I hope.  Its just two weeks away so stay tuned for the next cake creation and in the meantime I hope to get a new recipe up for you this week sometime.

L x

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