First, I’d like to thank GALA Cakes for the inspiration on this adventure. Second, I’d like to thank Andrew for his loving patience, great ideas and hard work in making this cake a reality.

Now, onto the cake!

We made this cake for the Halloween party where I work. Unfortunately, I took the day off to prepare for the trick or treaters, so we’ll have to eat it tomorrow instead of Tuesday. I’m still not quite sure how we are going to cut it.

What you see are two 8″ square cakes, side by side. Each pan requires a full box of cake mix, 4 cups of which are baked for each 8″ square. The extra 1 1/2 – 2 cups are used to make a single 6″ cake, which can be made into anything you like (see below for an example). After both cakes cooled, they were frozen overnight. Then, both of the tops were cut off. The tops were each moved off the cake slightly and turned on an angle, then cut with a serrated bread knife to form the two hills.

The fence is chocolate covered pretzels. The tombstones are chocolate covered Pepperidge Farms Milano cookies. The path is chocolate icing covered in Oreo cookie crumbs. The coffins are made of graham crackers, broken to shape and glued together with chocolate, then covered in chocolate with a paintbrush. The cauldron and flames are piped royal icing. The grass is also piped out using royal icing.

From the two extra 6″ cakes that were made with leftover cake mix, I made a Ghost Cake. Once frozen, I cut the top off one of the 6″ cakes, then iced it to glue the second 6″ cake on top. I left the dome shape alone on the top cake to help with the curvature. The dome sliced off the 1st cake then went atop the whole thing, glued down with icing. The whole thing was given a crumb coating, left to dry then iced with a thick layer of white buttercream.

White fondant was rolled out into a 12″ circle and laid over top of the cake. I purposely left it hanging off the stand to make it look like he’s wearing a simple sheet. Then I dyed a tiny bit of fondant black, rolled it out and cut the eyes and mouth. They are pasted on with water.

Overall I am quite pleased with the outcome on both cakes. I think the Haunted Graveyard Cake took us about 10 hours over the course of two days. The Ghost Cake took about 90 minutes total. I sure hope they are as yummy as they look!

Happy Halloween, everybody!