Halloween: Of Ghosts and Pumpkins

Boo!

So I'm back (finally!) with a Halloween themed bake that I made for our department charity bake sale this week. The theme was to bake something scary for Halloween, and I was thinking "well... do you mean scary as in boo! scary or scary as in....scary..ly bad?" Because, you know, I can do the latter pretty well.

I just don't put it on my blog... :)

So my cake isn't even a 'boo' kind of scary because I think that this ghost is pretty cute! I tried to make it more Casper than something out of the Poltergeist because, well why would you on a cake?

And here Casper is in all of his aerial view glory. Actually, from this angle looks more like an octopus, no?

And I took ages piping this icing so I took a photo of it. It doesn't even look that neat. But it hides all manners of cake sins when the edges of the orange bit just look awful.

So what are you dressing up as for Christmas? I am, I'm afraid, completely and utterly boring as have gone as a black cat for the last 5 years. I have got the whiskers down to an art. So this year, I decided that I must do better and be more creative and go as a....leopard. 

But! I am a champion (champion), and you're gonna hear me roar! (oh oh oh oh oh oh).

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And below are some step by step instructions for the decorations. The cake inside is pretty simple as I decided to just do a victoria sponge with jam and buttercream icing, but the outside takes a bit more time.

You will need:
1x cake mix with filling of choice
1x ready to roll icing (the bigger pack is always better)
1x marzipan ready to roll, lots (and lots) of orange food colouring (I used the gel one by Dr Oetker, three tubes of it nonetheless) and green food colouring. 
1x butter cream to decorate the bottom
A black icing pen to draw the ghosts eyes. Melted chocolate will also do :)
And some marmalade to stick the top icing to the marzipan.

1) This bit is optional but I find it makes the cake smoother on the outside. Start with the marzipan and roll it out so it will cover the cake. Drape over the cake and cut down the excess. Warm up the marmalade and brush over the marzipan (this will help the icing stick better).

2) Then you move on to the ready to roll icing.. Keep about 1/10th of it to colour green and 1/10th for the ghost which you keep white. Colour the rest orange (you'll need more than you think of orange food colouring to make it look very orange). 

3) For orange icing, keep about 1/8th of that for the pumpkins you will make later. Roll the rest out into a circle on a floured surface. Then drape this over the marzipan on the cake, trimming down the excess. And ta da! You should have one very orange-y cake!

4) For the ghost you will need two pieces. One rolled our flat into a circle and one rolled into a pointy ball. Drape the 'cloak' over the ball and fold in the bottom bits so it creates folds. This took me a few tries so don't get disheartened!

5) Draw some eyes on the ghost. My black icing tube exploded when I first tried so I got a very large droopy eye but the great thing is you can just wipe it off and try again!

4) For the pumpkin, shape some orange icing into a ball, and use a toothpick to shape the groves into it. Stick a bit of green icing on the top of the vine bit.

5) Okay so to make sure the decorations didn't fall off I stuck all of them on a toothpick first and then stuck that into the cake. Just make sure to tell anyone eating the cake that there are toothpicks in it!

6) Looking good, Casper.

7) Feel free to add more green bits to your pumpkin patch or some leaves if you want. I added a few more pumpkins of different sizes.

8) Last I made up some buttercream and piped it around the edges to hide the messy edges that I cut off. 

9) Make a scary wish and you are good to go!

I hope you liked it. Have a spooky Halloween!!