I love any time of year when I get to do some creative baking, and Halloween is definitely one of those times! Last year, I made a spiderweb cake for us to eat. This year, because I also had some customer orders, I got to try a few different things!
The customer orders were for cupcakes. I made three different kinds:
One batch was a vanilla raspberry ripple cupcake, topped with salted caramel frosting that I piped to look like brains.
One was the same flavour cupcake, topped with lemon frosting that I piped as an abstract pumpkin. It was my first time trying to pipe leaves and after a few practice tries, it went pretty well.
For the 3rd batch, I found some cupcake wrappers and toppers on Amazon that were murder-themed and I had to try something with those. The cupcakes were chocolate with a raspberry centre. I topped them with vanilla buttercream and some raspberry compote to emulate blood. I discovered some cool colour theory along the way …. Because of the butter that is in buttercream, it never comes out white. Because of that, some people suggest making the buttercream with shortening but it doesn’t taste as good. I happened upon a YouTube video this week about making white frosting. She said that since purple is on the opposite side of the colour wheel to yellow, if you add a tiny bit of purple food colouring to the frosting, it will turn white. It worked! Mind blown!! The white frosting really made the red pop!
My last bit of Halloween baking this weekend was a cake. Cakes are my absolute favourite thing to make and I find I can really work my creativity with them. This cake was one just for the family so I made a smaller 6-inch cake. I was inspired by the “Bloody Murder” cupcakes to do something on a bigger scale. The cake itself was a chocolate cake with raspberry filling and the same vanilla buttercream that I used for the cupcakes. To decorate the cake, I used some of the raspberry compote to speak and splatter the sides of the cake and cake board. Then I combined some with some pink candy melts, a bit of water and some food colouring to make the bloody drip. For the broken glass shards, I used this recipe. I cooked some sugar, water and corn syrup to the hard crack stage. Then I quickly mixed in a bit of clear vanilla extract for flavour and poured it over a lined cookie sheet. After 2 hours, the sugar had fully set and I used a mallet to smash it into pieces. What fun!
I’m immensely proud of how the cake turned out. What do you think?
Woah!