To help you get started scheming and designing your ghoulish confections, here are a few Halloween Cake Design Ideas. Try these or create your own spin-off's!
Haunted House - Sheet, Novelty Pan or Sculpted Castle
This Halloween cake can be made in many ways.
1. Trim a sheet cake into the shape of an old Victorian house with gables. Then pipe icing windows, doors, and other details, including cobwebs. Ghostly shapes are easy to pipe and fill in with snow-white buttercream icing. Add bats and other easy to pipe Halloween creatures.
2. Or you can use a novelty cake pan with the haunted house theme. Many of these come with decorations and instructions.
3. For a really exciting Halloween cake, try a haunted castle cake! Butter cakes works well. Stack two or more cakes, being sure to place supportive plates in between the layers. If the cake is large like a wedding cake, add cake dowels.
Towers can be created with upside down ice-cream cones or paper towel rolls, shortened to fit proportionally to your cake.
For edible towers, bake a pound cake in a jelly roll pan, and then using a cookie-cutter or glass, cut our circular pieces of uniform size. Skewer these, and then stick the skewered towers into the cake. Then ice them and pipe designs and windows.
For an amazing haunted house castle - think detail. For example, you could cut out windows and place inside kooky ghosts or other ghoulish figures (modeled with rolled buttercream, created with gum paste molds, or store-bought).
You might even want to add a moat and drawbridge! Tuck green miniature lights behind the turrets and under the drawbridge for an eerie glow.
A basic set of confectionary tools will help you model your Halloween cake creatures. You can find these and all sorts of decorating supplies at www.CandylandCrafts.com
If you model your Halloween cake figures with gum paste, creations will dry hard and last for years, but the children won't enjoy the taste much. Marzipan's expensive, and this almond paste isn't as much of a hit with kids as grown-ups. Your best bet for your Halloween cakes is Rolled Buttercream. It's a great tasting icing dough that can be easily modeled or molded.
Frankenstein's Bride - Vintage Halloween Cake
Here's a spin off from our charming doll cake that is made with a Barbie type doll and a cake dress. Use a doll with black hair. Tease the hair so it's all puffed up and then paint the lightening stripes up each side of her hair do. (For a humorous version, you could make her hair stand straight up).
Paint her face a pasty white, add make-up (search online for "Bride of Frankenstein doll" and "Bride of Frankenstein costumes" for ideas. Cover the negligee dress with smooth, white buttercream and maybe add some black spiders and lacy impressions.
Another idea: A vintage 60's Halloween doll cake could be fashioned after the Adam's Family's Mortisha.
Jack o' Lantern Bundt Halloween Cake
This is an easy Halloween cake for cake decorators new to cake sculpting.
Young children will adore a Jack o' Lantern cake with a cute or goofy expression, while most older kids will get a kick out of an outlandish or spooky face.
Start with 2 bundt cakes (butter, pumpkin and pound cakes work well). Then after leveling and icing the bottom of the cakes, fit them together to form the pumpkin. Cover the pumpkin with smooth, orange buttercream. Then pipe and/or use rolled buttercream to model the facial features. Pipe green leaves on top and add a stem made of rolled buttercream or an upside-down ice cream cone, iced with green.
Last, but not least, here's an important Halloween Cake tip. The amount of liquid food coloring needed to create black or dark brown icing will probably give your icing a bitter taste. To avoid making a Halloween cake that tastes creepier than it looks, try one of these ghoulishly clever tips:
· Use gel, paste or powder coloring. They're concentrated, so you won't need as much.
· Begin with dark chocolate buttercream, and you'll need even less.
· Instead of black icing, cover plain buttercream with crushed, dark chocolate cookies, and use licorice and such for spiders and bats.
