Zombie Cake

I made this cake version of our logo for a gala party we threw to celebrate our 100th review on theyrecoming.com.

The highlight of the party, if I do say so myself, was my zombie cake, which we named Orville, after the dead guy in Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, though it looked nothing like him. In effect, it was a three-dimensional version of our logo, a zombie rising up out of the grave, or, in this case, rising up out of a field of my homemade French cream candies. The head was made of sour cream chocolate chip cake, dyed red to resemble brain matter, covered with modeling chocolate and various other frosting and hard candy details. The hand was made of mint-flavored hard candy bones covered with chocolate. Green hard candy letters around the perimeter reminded everyone that "They're coming to get you, Barbara." At the height of the party we gathered everyone around it to witness the thrilling moment when raspberry flavored blood spurted from his eyes and poured from his mouth. In fact, it sprayed a bit further than I expected it to. Fortunately only my sister and I were hit.

I calculated that, between the cake, the French creams, and the bloody eyeball cordial cherries, I went through 15 pounds of granulated sugar, 2 bags of powdered sugar, 8 large bags of chocolate chips, 2 bottle of corn syrup, 8 pounds of dark chocolate, and 4 pounds of white chocolate. I have a slight tendency to go overboard with these things. We have a lot of eyeballs left over.

The first step is to make the French creams that will be used for the dirt in the zombie presentation. The creams have a flavored fondant center, dipped in chocolate, and then rolled in chopped nuts. Here, I am preparing the fondant by working it on a marble slab.

These are the completed fondant centers. The colors are all flavored differently -- I believe these are chocolate, pistachio, cherry, and orange. At this point, we're five days before the party.

Here, I am tempering the chocolate to prepare it for dipping the creams. I’m using a double boiler and candy thermometer.

After the chocolate was tempered, I poured out a portion onto the marble slab. I dipped each fondant center into the chocolate, and then rolled it in the chopped nuts. The candies were completed four days before the party.

As a side dish to the zombie cake, I decided I also wanted to make cordial cherry eyeballs. Before dipping the maraschino cherries, they were soaked in rum or brandy for several days. They were then dipped in the center filling and left to dry. After this, I dipped them in white chocolate. Dark chocolate is better, but it wouldn't really work for the eyeball concept.

Yes, we had lots of eyeballs. They were painted using powdered food coloring dissolved in melted cocoa butter.

And we finally start the cake! Yes, it really did require that much cake. We used a recipe from The Joy of Cooking for a very yummy sour cream chocolate chip cake. Red food coloring swirled in the batter gave it a delicious-looking bloody brain color. Any light-colored cake would work as well.

This is me straining the fresh raspberry sauce which will be used for blood. This is great over cake or ice cream, even if your dessert doesn't bleed. Puree 1 pint of raspberries, 3 tablespoons of sugar, and 2 teaspoons of lemon juice in a food processor. Then strain the mixture through a fine sieve to remove the seeds.

Ok, we've skipped a few steps here (clearly). This is the completed base of the cake. There are 5 layers of cake here, frosted with a chocolate ganache, which is made by melting semisweet chocolate with cream, and if you like (and why wouldn't you?) flavored with liqueur. Because it's so tall, we had to use interior supports, or the whole thing would have just toppled over. I cut a circle of foam core and stacked it between the middle layers. It's supported below with wooden dowels pushed into the cake, trimmed to just below the level of the layer. Of course, it was a little more complicated than that, since the plumbing system also had to be installed. You can see the large pastry bag to the right of the head, which is filled with whole lot of raspberry syrup. The bag is attached to a plastic tube, which curves behind the cake and enters in the back. Inside the cake, there's plumbing to send the syrup to outlets behind both eyes and the mouth. The outlets are blocked with frosting to prevent premature ejaculation, so to speak.

Once the base of the cake was completed, I started sculpting the facial features out of modeling chocolate, which is semisweet chocolate melted with corn syrup. Once chilled, it's very easy to work with and pretty tasty.

This is the completed face, with all the modeling chocolate details.

These are hard candy eyeballs, which were made by pouring out hot candy (sugar, water, corn syrup, and coloring) and pushing it into icky globs as it cools. Orville's right eye is already covered with a candy eye, so when the blood is pushed through, it'll fill up behind the eye before spilling out.

Orville's left eye has fallen out, so the other candy eyeball is just placed on the base. The blood details are done with royal icing.

The next step is to paint the face details and the blood. The paint is powdered food coloring mixed with melted cocoa butter. It has a consistency kind of like oil paints, and the cocoa butter can be melted in the microwave.

Here's me painting blood on the bits of exposed skull. The skull is done with royal icing, with modeling chocolate layered over it to make the ragged edges.

Here's Orville's hand, rising up out of the orange ground. Prior to placing the hand, the base was frosted with royal icing colored to match our site. The bones of the hand are mint-flavored hard candy, dipped in dark chocolate. The finger nails are royal icing.

I display my zombie hair-making tool. I made it by cutting up some old coat hangers taped to a ruler, creating sort of a deformed whisk. To make the hair, I dipped the ends of the deformed whisk in hot candy, and then whipped it back and forth over two wooden spoons attached to the edge of the counter. As the candy cooled, it hardened into wispy somewhat hair-like strands.

Here's the skull with the hair attached. The strands are thin enough that they just kind of melt onto the head.

Note the lovely hairy eyebrows. Orville's left shoulder is the raspberry blood-filled bag, covered with a t-shirt. His right shoulder is made of fondant (cake fondant, not the kind used as the centers of the chocolate creams).

You can see the layers on the platform here, created to give Orville uneven ground to climb out of. The platform is made out of foam core, glued together in layers and covered with royal icing.

And here we have the full dirt presentation. The French creams are arranged around Orville, creating a lovely field of dirt. The different types of nuts create a nicely varied texture.

This is the hard candy lettering that followed the curve of the base, reminding us, "They're Coming To Get You, Barbara!". Usually I just pour the hot candy directly onto the marble slab in the shape I want. The letters require more detail than that method allows. The candy is hot enough to melt a paper or plastic pastry tube, so I used a 70's-era metal pastry tube, and filled that with the hot candy. I wasn't able to find a similar one online, and I'm not sure they're even made any more.

Orville looks pretty happy in the French cream dirt. Too bad about his eye.

Wow, Orville has big hands. You can see that the shirt covering the raspberry blood bag has now been distressed (as you'd expect a zombie's shirt to be).

And here we are post-explosion! When I squished Orville's left shoulder, the blood shot out his left eye, slightly splattering both of us (but fortunately none of our guests).

I put our cleaver to good use serving the cake.

We did a fair job on the back of Orville's head, but of course we had at least three quarters of the cake left. My sister brought it in to work the next Monday, but her co-workers were oddly hesitant to cut into the face. She eventually dissected him and removed the face and all the plumbing, and that seemed to be more appetizing.

Lovely parting shot, eh? During the first spurt of blood, the frosting cap over the mouth didn't come off. Once I removed it, the blood just kind of oozed out the mouth, it was very nice. I really like the little drops of blood on the right cheek.

Rapunzel's Castle

Candies used: Large and small jelly beans, pink and white mint lozenges, Snowcaps, large and small nonpareils, Necco wafers, chocolate rocks, Tart N Tinies, gold and silver dragees, rainbow sprinkles, royal icing, rolled fondant. I assembled the tower then covered it with jelly beans and nonpareils. I then added details like Tart N Tinies and dragees and drew vines and flowers on the tower with royal icing. I drew the flowers and the hanging tower details with royal icing on wax paper. After they dried, I attached them. The grass is royal icing, applied with a grass decorating tip, with individual blades added between the "paving stones." Rapunzel, the prince, and the witch are colored rolled fondant, which I made from scratch, with royal icing details and rainbow sprinkle irises.

Cauldron Pumpkin

Bat and Sleeper Pumpkin

This is my attempt at foreshortening in pumpkin carving, inspired by Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ.

Spider Skull Pumpkin

This won second prize in the Pumpkinmasters Animals category.

Sorcerer’s Library Pumpkin

This pumpkin won me 1st prize in the Pumpkinmaster’s Lettering category. Here’s an edited version because the titles are a little hard to read in the photo.

Easy Heart Cake

Instructions on how to make a simple heart cake that bleeds raspberry sauce when you cut it. It's easy, delicious, and sure to be a hit at your next Valentine's Day party!

We thought you all might enjoy the instructions for this simple bleeding heart cake because it's quick and easy to make and delivers a dramatic effect for very little effort. It also requires almost no baking skills or cake decorating experience.

To start with, you'll need to bake a cake in a heart-shaped pan. Any kind of cake will work, including any simple, boxed cake mix, though I like to make mine from scratch. Ideally, make two cakes, to stack one on top of the other. A deeper cake will give you much more space on the inside to fill with blood. You want it to really pour out, don't you?

Once both cakes are baked and cool, level off the tops with a bread knife or cake leveler so your cake will be nice and flat. Then, frost the top of one tier with icing (or any other filling, jam, etc. that you want to use) and stack the other tier on top of it. It works best if you put the two cut sides of the cakes together, leaving the two perfectly flat sides that were at the bottom of the cake pan to be the top and bottom of the finished cake.

Now, scoop a sizable hollow out of the bottom of the cake. The bottom, of course, is on top, if you follow me, as the cake is upside-down at this point. The larger the hole you hollow out, the more blood you will be able to fit inside the cake. Of course, you'll also have less cake, so it's sort of a judgment call. Just make sure to leave a decent layer of cake on top of the hollow. You don't want the whole cake collapsing in on itself.

Once you have a hollow you're happy with, frost the inside with buttercream icing. Do a thorough job, so the cake is totally sealed. You don't want the blood to soak into the cake. While you're frosting things, also frost the bottom of the cake where it'll come in contact with the plate. Be generous. This icing is what keeps the blood from seeping out around the edges of the cake.

Now you're ready to add the blood. I like to use fresh raspberry sauce because it's bright red and totally delicious, but of course any red sauce or syrup will work as well. If you'd like to make the fresh raspberry sauce, it's quite easy. Just puree some raspberries and add a smidge of lemon juice and sugar to taste. Then strain the liquid to get the seeds out.

Fill the hollow carefully with blood. Make it fairly full, but definitely not overflowing. Now, set the plate or tray you're going to be using upside down on top of the cake. Squish it down into the icing so that the edge is sealed. Be sure to use a waterproof tray or plate, not a cardboard cake circle, because the sauce will soak into cardboard. I like to use a white plate because the blood shows up well on it.

Carefully holding the cake onto the plate, flip the entire assembly over, so the cake and plate are now right side up. Congratulations! You now have a cake full of blood and you're ready to start decorating.

You can, of course, decorate the cake any way you'd like, using any kind of icing. I've gone in two opposite directions with my decor. The first time I made this cake, I iced it with bright pink buttercream, and then added white trim so it looked like a lovely, innocent valentine heart until blood started pouring out of it. The next time, I made the cake look evil from the outset with sickly maroon and grey icing and candles shaped like tombstones. I leave it to you to decide which option is more effective.

When it's time to cut the cake, I like to do the honors with a meat cleaver. Failing that, I recommend you use the biggest knife available. If you separate the cake a little with the knife while making the first cut, you'll get an even more impressive flow of blood.

An alternate version of this cake I once did involved the heart actually beating. Instead of just pouring the blood into a hollow in the cake, I poured it into a Ziploc bag. The bag was then attached to a turkey baster via a length of rubber tubing. I placed the bag inside the hollow in the cake, leaving the baster outside, concealed under a piece of fabric that I draped decoratively around the perimeter of the cake. The hollow in this cake was deeper than the hollow in the other version of the cake, so that the bag was very near the surface of the cake. When I squeezed the bulb of the turkey baster in rhythm, the bag expanded and contracted, pushing up the top of the cake, so the heart appeared to be beating.

Of course, this version of the cake isn't optimal for serving, since in order to get the blood out, you have to pull the bag out of the cake, puncture the bag, and pour the blood either into a bowl or on top of the cut pieces of cake. This is inconvenient, but does have the advantage of being entertainingly messy. I wound up with the hands dripping with raspberry blood sauce! Jason Voorhees himself never looked better!

Another variation I've done, which requires a little more sculptural skill, is to make an oversized anatomical heart. For this cake, I started with a large round cake, and then carved it into the shape of a heart. I used fondant icing to cover the cake and to sculpt additional veins and arteries, then painted the whole thing with food coloring, mostly red (obviously) and blue. The bleeding mechanism is the same as for the basic heart cake. When I made this cake I also poured a layer of clear hard sugar over the top, so cutting the cake would be like breaking someone's heart. I don't recommend this, though. It just made the cake very difficult to cut. Maybe this would work if you were planning to smash the cake with a hammer. If you spray or brush the cake with a little thinned corn syrup, you'll get the same oozy, wet look without the inconvenient hard candy shell.

Pumpkin Girl

Scarecrow Pumpkin

I Am Not Afraid of the Dark Pumpkin

This pumpkin won an honorable mention in the Pumpkinmasters Lettering category.

Whistler’s Mummy Pumpkin

This is obviously based on Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1.

Moan-a Lisa Pumpkin

This pumpkin won first prize in the Pumpkinmasters Shadows category, which is what they call it when the pumpkin casts a fun shape in light behind it.

Gehenna Gothic Pumpkin

Clearly, this pumpkin is based on the Grant Wood’s American Gothic. It won third prize in the Pumpkinmasters sculpting category.

Witch Pumpkin

Vulture Pumpkin

Wolf Pumpkin

Enter at Your Own Risk Pumpkin

This pumpkin won an honorable mention in the Pumpkinmasters lettering category.

Mangled Face Pumpkin

Spider Pumpkin

This pumpkin won 3rd prize in the Pumpkinmasters animal category and they published a pattern based on it.