Halloween is traditionally a time for sweets and candy. We at the Little School of Horrors though like to bend the rules a little, so we decided that rather than buying bags of sweets (that Mr Grimm would eat anyway!) we would do some baking and make some Halloween inspired cakes and we are here to share a few tips and tricks to aid you guys in making them yourself! What we aren’t doing is providing cake recipes as we are sure you either have them already or know where to get them.
So the first step will be to bake some cupcakes using your favourite recipe. Ours are a basic sponge cake style. We also found some Halloween cupcake cases in our local supermarket to add to the theme.
Now onto the fun part… decorating! We will start simple with some skeletons rising from the ground.
The ‘soil’ on these cakes is actually crushed up Oreo cookies (minus the creamy filling). These could be crushed up using a pestle and mortar, but any kids helping with this will probably appreciate our method more. Take a few cookies, scrape off the filling (which the kids can eat) wrap the cookies in clingfilm and then a tea-towel and then smash them to little bits with a rolling pin! Unwrap and empty the crumbs into a bowl. Now mix up some icing sugar and water, paste onto the cookies and then dip them into the Oreo crumbs. This will give you a nice graveyard earthy effect.
The skeletons on these cakes were Halloween decorations that again came from a local supermarket. They were simply cut up at various points on their bodies and stuck into the cake. Of course, giving them a wash first is advisable and they aren’t edible so may not be suitable for younger children.
Of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to toy skeletons either as can be seen in the ghostly ‘Boo’ cake. Another supermarket purchase with no small parts this time, the plastic ghost shape had a slit cut into the cake that it then rests in.
If you’d like a fully edible cake, then how about a creepy hand clawing its way out the earth? Again, we use an Oreo coated cupcake, but now we have added some fingers made from ready-to-roll icing (also called fondant icing). Adding a very, very small amount of yellow food colouring gives the fingers that pale, sickly dead look while the finger nails are simply almond flakes pressed into the icing. Grooves can be carved into the finger shapes using just about anything. A few extra Oreo crumbs can be sprinkled on top of the hand to complete the look.
If you really want to stretch your artistic abilities a bit, you try some fondant icing sculpture. These next two cakes do require a bit more time and effort though, so be warned! You may also find you need some cake sculpting tools for this, but they can be ordered from Amazon for a few pounds. We’ve included a link at the bottom of this post to some tools we used.
First up is the Mexican Day of the Dead style skull. Take a cupcake and break off a couple of chunks to create holes. Roll out a sheet of icing a couple of millimetres thick and lay it over the cake, using your fingers to form it into those holes. Trim the edges of the icing where it overhangs onto your work surface. This will create a nice basic skull shape that could now have teeth, eyes and nose holes painted on, but we aren’t going to stop there!
With a little bit of time playing with the icing and using some of those sculpting tools, you can make a nice 3D effect face for your skull.
After that it’s simply a case of decorating it, either by painting food colouring on or using squeezy tubes of gel icing.
If you’ve now got the bug for sculpting then give a green zombie hand a go! Again, it’s made from fondant icing but this one is held onto the cake using a tooth pick running through the arm.
So there you go. A few inspirational ideas on spooky Halloween cakes! You can either try some of these, or simply use them as inspiration, but we’d love to see any that you guys make. You can either email us pictures at post them directly to our Facebook page!
Happy eating!
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Cake sculpting tools we used:
Andrew James Cake Decorating, Craft Modelling 8 Piece Tool Set
