Melting Head Cake

I made this delightful severed head presentation for a party celebrating our 400th review on theyrecoming.com.

I admit that we celebrated Bride of Zombiefest before we had actually posted our 400th review on theyrecoming.com (which the party was ostensibly in honor of), but we were close and we needed to schedule it while I was still visiting my sister for the summer.

Bride of Zombiefest was also the perfect opportunity for me to make a cake that has been percolating in my head for a while now. The idea was a severed head cake, served up on a silver platter with an attractive array of garnishes, with flesh that would melt off over the course of the party, revealing the grinning skull underneath.

It was obvious that the skull should be made of royal icing, but the question of what to make the flesh out of proved to be a thornier problem. My initial plan was to use buttercream icing and put the cake on a hotplate. I'm glad that I decided to test this plan prior to implementation because the experimental buttercream nose, piped onto the experimental royal icing skull fragments, did not melt at all. Not even a little bit. My sister and I thought that the nose got a little shinier with the heat, but even that may have been wishful thinking.

This preliminary test did teach me a few important things, in addition to the big lesson that buttercream icing does not melt, at least not when I want it to. For instance, I learned that it is, in fact, safe to put buttercream icing onto royal icing, provided that the royal icing is dry first and it's the quick and easy buttercream, not the fancy cooked buttercream. I tried to put royal icing onto cake filled with the fancy buttercream for my sister's baby shower and the royal icing just dissolved into oily goo. I also learned that both red piping gel and seedless raspberry jam are fully compatible with royal icing. This was important because I needed something red to put on top of the skull and underneath the flesh so that the melting would also be bloody. I settled on the raspberry jam because it tastes better, but I actually think in retrospect that the red piping gel might have worked a little better.

At this point, though, I was far more concerned about the flesh's failure to melt. Clearly buttercream icing was not the answer, so I tried boiled icing. Boiled icing really doesn't taste very good at all, but I had high hopes for its melting properties as I confidently made another test nose and set it on the hot plate. And . . . nothing. No melting. Nothing even close to melting. Not so much as a little bit of softening or a sheen of moisture.

At this point I nearly gave up on the melting aspect of the cake. Bear in mind that while I was carrying out these tests the day of the party was fast approaching and I was already well into the creation of the advance elements of the cake - the bloody eyeballs, the skull, and the garnishes, which I will discuss in more detail later in this narrative. But I decided to persevere and test one final type of icing - whipped cream icing. I have never used whipped cream icing before because it is notoriously unstable and the cake, once frosted, has to be frozen or refrigerated. Surely this intimidating, unreliable icing would be fragile enough to melt off my cake!

I made a few test noses this time, so I could test the icing in the fridge and the freezer as well as on the hot plate. I also made test noses of a 50-50 mix of boiled icing and whipped cream icing, because I was afraid that the whipped cream icing, by itself, would be too unstable.(I also tried mixing the whipped cream icing with the buttercream icing, but this instantaneous collapsed into a lumpy mess.) It turned out, however, that the whipped cream icing is actually sturdier and more structural by itself than in conjunction with the boiled icing. And, to my lasting delight, it turns out that whipped cream icing does, in fact, melt when placed on a hotplate!

With rekindled hope for the melting face, I performed a few additional tests on the whipped cream icing to determine if it can be painted with an airbrush (It can.) and to determine if it can be painted with a paintbrush (It can, but only if it's thoroughly frozen.). At this point I also hit on the idea of using a heat lamp to melt the cake from above in conjunction with the hotplate melting it from below. Of course, I didn't have a heat lamp, but I tried a 60 watt bulb and even that melted the test nose, so I went out and bought a heat lamp from the hardware store across the street, as well as a 200 watt bulb. I would have bought two heat lamps, but they only had one, which, as you'll see later, was very fortuitous.

And thus ends the saga of my icing experiments, leaving me ready to move on the saga of the actual cake. So if you thought the icing story was long-winded and melodramatic, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The first step of the cake construction was to make the royal icing skull. For maximum accuracy, I purchased a plastic skull to use as a mold. I used tin foil to cover the skull because it holds the shape really well, but it does have some disadvantages. Because tin foil is opaque it was hard to see the breaks between the skull segments and tin foil also seems to lengthen the dry time of the royal icing. This wouldn't be a problem except that I'm impatient and wasn't willing to wait more than a day to try to unmold the pieces, at which point they were not completely dry. Thus, it took me three tries to make a solid jawbone. I actually managed to wait three days before unmolding the last one, so it was completely dry and came off perfectly.

Unmolding aside, actually making the icing skull was really quite easy. I piped the icing on with a wide, flat tip, then smoothed it with a slightly damp paintbrush.

While I was making things out of royal icing, I also made fifty-odd little tiaras. Why, you ask? Well, we were afraid that a cake the size of a human head wouldn't serve the twenty-five to thirty guests we were expecting at our party, so we decided to make supplemental cupcakes. If the party was Bride of Zombiefest, and the cake was the Bride, then clearly the cupcakes should be the Bridesmaids of the Monster - little fuzzy monster cupcakes (with cotton candy fur; more on that later.) So they needed tiaras, which I piped flat, then draped over a roll of wrapping paper so they would dry with a nice curve. I also made little royal icing eyes for the cupcakes, with painted irises and tiny red veins.

The next pre-baking project was the eyeballs. I have made cordial cherry eyeballs several times before and they're also summarized in the description of the cake from our first Zombiefest. Basically, maraschino cherries are soaked in brandy for a few days then drained and dipped, first in a melted coating fondant, then in white chocolate. The nice thing about the eyeballs is that they actually look better when I don't dip the cherries neatly because weird drips and blobs look like veins and pools of blood. Once the chocolate is set, the eyeballs are painted with powdered food coloring dissolved in melted cocoa butter. Some of the eyeballs were served on their own; others were used as garnishes on the head's serving tray; still others served as the eyes of the head itself.

Next came the other garnishes for the head platter - lettuce, tomatoes, and parsley. My sister came up with the idea of how to make the lettuce. I bought actual lettuce (Romaine), dusted the back with corn starch, then pressed a very thin sheet of gum paste onto it so that the gum paste picked up all the lettuce veins. I then ripped the edge a little to get it rough, rolled the edge with a ball tool to ruffle and thin it, and draped the gum paste lettuce over a bed of wax paper so it would dry with nice shape. The parsley was even easier. I just used a very small gum paste flower cutter, then cupped it with a ball tool.

For the tomatoes, I used a 50-50 gum paste-fondant mix, mostly because I didn't have enough gum paste so I had to use the fondant to stretch it. I colored this mixture bright yellow and rolled it into cherry tomato-sized balls. I used an umbrella tool to make the little divot in the top and then rolled the tomato in my hand once more to get it nice and round.

I colored all of these garnishes with ground up chalk pastels and then steamed them in front of a kettle of boiling water to set the color and give it a little sheen.

Finally, we're at the baking stage! I made a chocolate cake for the bottom of the head, then a lemon butter cake, swirled with black food coloring to give it a nice brain color, for the top of the head. I also made about fifty lemon butter cupcakes.

Once cool, I torted and filled the cakes with buttercream icing and, using my plastic skull as a model, carved the cake into the proper shape. My royal icing skull fit together remarkably well over top of the cake. At this point, it would actually have been a pretty cool looking cake in and of itself, but I was nowhere near done.

A coating of raspberry jam made the skull look delightfully freshly skinned, especially once I had popped the cordial cherry eyeballs into place.

At this point I transferred the cake onto its silver serving tray (borrowed from a church where a friend of mine works) and I could no longer avoid the part of the operation of which I was most terrified - the icing. I put the head in the freezer for a little while first so it would be nice and cold when the icing hit it.

Actually icing the cake went more smoothly than I had feared. It took me three batches of whipped cream icing and between each batch I put the cake in the freezer. Piping the whipped cream icing for details like the nose, lips, ears, and eyelids was a little challenging because if I held the piping bag for too long the icing got too soft, but all in all I was happy with the face creation process. I was trying for a woman's face because she was supposed to be a bride, but it turned out looking androgynous, possibly skewed a little towards the masculine. I hoped that a little airbrushed makeup would tip it into womanhood. Into the freezer it went!

Airbrushing the cake was a little nerve-wracking because the room where I was working was really hot so I had to work fast. I also had to mask off the eyeballs and teeth with parchment paper which was very difficult to do without messing up the icing, but it all went pretty well in the end. The blue eyeshadow (I grew up in the 80's so it somehow got into my head that eyeshadow is always blue. Since I don't wear makeup myself, I've never really been disabused of this notion.), blush, and lipstick did make her look a little more feminine, but she still had a bit of an old man in drag vibe about her.

The garnishes went into place quickly and easily with a few dabs of royal icing and that was all I could do until right before the party. At this point, she was still bald, but my plan was to use cotton candy for the hair and cotton candy doesn't have a great deal of longevity. So the cake went into the freezer and I went to bed.

The party was scheduled for 12:30 in the afternoon, evening parties being inadvisable now that my sister has a five-month-old daughter. At about 9:00a.m. we started making cotton candy. First we made some colored cotton candy for the cupcake fur, using sugar mixed with powdered food coloring. A little ball of cotton candy went on top of each cupcake, followed by a tiara and a pair of eyes.

Our cotton candy machine is actually a children's toy that we purchased at a garage sale for three dollars, so it is perhaps not surprising that it overheated after about half of the cupcakes. I had a few moments of panic when I thought that it would not be in service to make hair for the cake itself, but my sister suggested putting it in the freezer to cool it off quickly, which worked like a charm.

Afraid that the machine would crap out altogether next time, I made the hair for the cake next - a tower of white hair with black Bride-of-Frankenstein-style streaks on the side. I assembled the hair on the tin-foil-covered plastic skull first, then plopped it readymade onto the cake. It looked like a wig and only exacerbated the resemblance to a drag queen - a very old one, given the gaunt cheeks, the white hair, and, due to the icing texture, the pockmarked skin. But I considered that a minor problem. My sister said she looked like Mrs. Haversham. Dad thought she looked like a French aristocrat, which also might have been pretty appropriate, given that whole guillotine escapade.

I added a little red piping gel blood to the mouth so she would look more dead and a little red piping gel blood writing on the lettuce stating, of course, that, "They're coming to get you, Barbara". Then I took a whole lot of photos and popped her back in the freezer to await the party.

By this time the cotton candy machine had overheated again so I had to put it back in the freezer for a while before we could finish the cupcakes. But finish them we did, just before the party. By this time, the cotton candy on the first cupcakes was already wilting and we were afraid that the cotton candy hair on the cake herself would fare even worse, due to condensation from the freezer, so we decided that the cake would remain in the freezer until most of our guests had arrived, at which point we would dramatically reveal her, then turn on the heat lamps and hope for the best.

And . . . amazing enough . . . the best actually happened! Even better than I had hoped! I brought her out and set her on the hotplate, turned on the heat lamp on one side and the 200 watt bulb on the other and . . . her flesh started to melt! And, because I only had one heat lamp, at first only the left side of her face melted. Which was incredibly cool looking! She ended up with one side of her face still solid and the other melted all the way to the skull. The heat lamp even toasted the melted icing a bit at the closest point, so it looked like the skull had been cooked.

First, the hair melted, then the flesh on top of the skull. The eye socket started to appear, followed by the cheekbone, and the lower jaw. The nose was sloughed off, revealing the nasal cavity and the teeth appeared with a horrifying smile. The eyeball melted away, first crying tears of melted colored cocoa butter, then bursting open to reveal the shiny red cherry within. Red piping gel blood ran out of the mouth, mingling with the gooey white melted flesh.

Once the first side was thoroughly melted away, I switched the heat lamp to the other side until I was left with nothing but a gooey skull sitting in a pool of its own liquefied flesh. Even the garnish cordial cherry eyeballs melted away, leaving only bright cherries amidst the little red tomatoes.

In my darker moments I doubted the melting head cake. I'm ashamed to say that I even seriously considered throwing in the towel and just making a non-melting severed head cake. But that would have been unworthy. That would have been cowardly. I'm proud of myself that I didn't surrender to the temptation of taking the easy way out. I persevered and, in spite of the combined efforts of many different kinds of icing and a finicky cotton candy machine, I succeeded! It was a beautiful moment.

Killer Rats Cake

Introduction

The Killer Rats Cake was made for Son of Zombiefest, our celebration of the posting of our 300th review. Actually, to be fair to the rats, I don't really know that they killed the man they're eating. It's possible that they simply came upon the severed arm and decided it would make a tasty snack. That's why I referred to it through much of this process as the Rat-Arm Cake, but my sister pointed out, and I agreed, that was a very uninspiring title, so "The Killer Rats Cake" it became. Like its illustrious predecessor, The Zombie Cake, The Killer Rats Cake began life as a pattern for a carved pumpkin. Both the pumpkin and the cake depict a severed human arm being devoured by three large, ugly rats. Well, ugly in their cake incarnation, at any rate; they're sort of cute on the pumpkin. The cake arm was constructed in layers, from the inside out, so that a slice of the cake looked like a cross-section of an arm, complete with ulna, radius, bone marrow, skin, etc. Admittedly, this did not make for a spectacularly dynamic presentation, at least as compared to the cakes that burned or shot blood or secreted bodily fluids, but I think it was just as effective, in its understated fashion. Sometimes even I opt for subtlety and finesse over gaudy drama.

Because the cake was created in several separate segments, then assembled, I'm going break up this narrative accordingly, although in reality these processes were occurring simultaneously.

The Rats

The first step in constructing the rats was to make the gum paste and fondant pieces that needed time to dry before they could be attached to the cake. I did this about five days before the party.

The rat ears are simply gum paste, rolled very thin, then cut into the shape of ears. I then thinned the edges even further with a ball tool and pinched the bottoms together to give the ears the appropriate shape.

The rat faces were a much more difficult proposition. As I always do, I started by finding a few good research photos to work off of. Of course, I couldn't find any pictures of rats that were as mean as I wanted my rats to be, so I supplemented the photos with the use of a really ugly, vicious, battery operated rat toy that I once bought for my sister at a KB Toys that was going out of business.

I made the rat faces out of a fifty-fifty mixture of gum paste and fondant. At first I had a lot of trouble sculpting them because I couldn't figure out how to handle them and set them down without distorting the features I had already carved. Eventually I discovered that I shouldn't try to pick them up, just set them on wax paper, noses facing up, and work on them that way. After that, things went much more smoothly and, with the help of various gum paste sculpting tools and a lot of shortening to keep the gum paste-fondant mix moist enough to work for the requisite period of time, I was able to crank out three pretty vicious looking rat faces, two with open mouths, one with mouth clenched as if he were in the process of ripping off a succulent morsel of flesh.

The next step was to cut a foam core base for each rat, which obviously necessitated my planning the body shape and position of each rat, so I would be able to stick the base to the cake, then carve around it.

Finally it was time for the actual cake. My sister was kind enough to bake the cakes for me. We used a red velvet cake recipe so the rats would look nice and meaty inside, and we started with three 10" round cakes. I then took each cake, leveled the top and split it into two layers using a cake leveler. Cutting each of these layers in half along the diameter of the circle allowed me to assemble the four resulting pieces into a four layer cake shaped like a semi-circle. I used buttercream icing as my filling between layers.

Once I had torted and filled all three cakes in that fashion, I was ready to carve, which is one of my favorite parts of the cake construction process. I started with the first cake upside down and stuck the foam core base to it with buttercream icing. Using a small, sharp kitchen knife I cut the cake so that it was about half an inch larger than the base all around, then flipped the cake sight side up. I then did the more detailed carving, rounding the body, giving the rat haunches, and cutting the front carefully so that the head would line up properly.

Having carved all three cakes, I was ready to attach the heads, which I did using buttercream icing, reinforced with a toothpick stuck between the back of the head and the front of the cake. I then frosted the rats with buttercream icing. I took two layers of icing, with some dry time in between, to cover most of the red in the cake.

Before adding fur, I used my cake airbrush to put a base coat of color on each rat. I planned to make one white rat, one brown rat, and one grey rat. For the white rat I used a pink base coat with some darker red and orange shadows. For the brown rat, I used a reddish-brown base, but left some lighter pink highlights. For the grey rat, I used a medium grey base, but with lighter grey and pink highlights. Then I decided that I wasn't satisfied with them, so I airbrushed in even more shadows and highlights.

The next step was the application of fur, which was made of spun sugar. I had decided, after a few experiments, for the sake of time to make all the fur colorless, then airbrush on the colors. Using Jacque Torres's recipe for spun sugar, I set up two long wooden spoons hanging over the edge of the counter, wrapped half the kitchen in plastic bags, then proceeded to fling hot sugar absolutely everywhere.

Because my spun sugar tools had a tendency to get gunked up and need to be washed after only five or six uses, it was good that I had two. One was a whisk with the curved ends cut off; the other was a wooden ruler with some cut up pieces of wire taped to it. The wire ends of either tool were dunked into a bowl of hot sugar, then whipped back and forth over the two wooden spoons, leaving a trail of thin strands of sugar behind. I then scooped up these thin strands and draped them over the rat bodies. After I had finished the first rat, I decided I had put too much fur on it, so I did less fur on the other two. As it turned out, I was wrong. The first rat, the one with more fur, wound up looking better than the other two.

Airbrushing onto spun sugar turns out to be a tricky operation because the sugar is so thin that it tends to dissolve if it gets wet. Long story short, I oversprayed the rats and the two with less fur wound up looking patchy and diseased. I rationalized this by saying that the scene took place in some kind of abandoned government lab which was full of all sorts of chemicals and viruses and the like. No wonder the rats are diseased! The rat that I thought had too much fur wound up looking really good.

Before applying the final coat of airbrushed color, I stuck ears to each rat, by simply jamming the bottoms of the ears into the cakes. I obviously should have attached them better, because several of them fell off and later had to be reattached.

There are details too delicate to the airbrushed onto cake rats, so I went in with a little brush to paint the insides of mouths and ears and eyes and noses. I also gave little white royal icing teeth to the one rat whose mouth remained open. The other rat that was supposed to have an open mouth settled somewhere along the line and wound up with a closed mouth. The third rat, of course, had a closed mouth to begin with.

The rats still needed, feet, tails, and bloody snouts, but that had to wait until they were positioned on the cake base, so I'll cover that in the Assembly section, which means we're ready to move on to the arm.

The Arm

To begin with, I needed a picture of an arm to work from. I couldn't use my own arm as model, because I wanted a big, hairy man arm. So I turned to my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, who was a very good sport about me photographing his arm and incorporating it into the cake.

The first step was to make the fingernails out of gum paste. My brother-in-law has much flatter, squarer fingernails than I do, so it took me a while to get the hang of them and to find an appropriately curved surface to drape them over to dry. I also discovered that the key to sculpting realistic fingernails is the subtle, vertical striations. Take a close look, you'll see what I mean.

I wanted to experiment with the skin before trying it on the real cake, both to find a good skin texture and because I hadn't used the airbrush much before and I wanted to make sure I knew how to handle it. So I rolled out some fondant and tried texturing it by pressing on it with various fabrics. The winning texture came from a blue dishtowel. I then made a couple of samples complete with protruding veins and let them dry before practicing airbrushing on them.

On the extras of one of the Lord of the Rings DVDs I saw a special effects guy explaining how the way to get a realistic skin coloring on a mask was to work outwards form the inside, that is, start with the veins, and build up the color in layers from there. So I tried it. I started by painting in blue and purple veins, then built up layers of reds, browns, yellows, pinks, and eventually white highlights on top. I think it worked pretty well, except that I need to learn some patience and let each layer dry completely before I do the next one.

Next came the bones. The bones of the hand are made from hard candy, colored with white and a bit of yellow and brown food coloring. I poured it onto a silpat mat into the shape of finger and hand bones, making many more than I needed, so I'd be able to mix and match the appropriate ones.

I wanted to make the arm bones out of white chocolate, but I had trouble getting it to set up properly, so I wound up using candy melts instead, which really don't taste as good. For molds for the bones I wrapped acetate paper into thin cones. I filled these with melted candy, then dumped then candy out, leaving only a thin coating on the inside of the acetate. I needed hollow bones, of course, in order to fill them with marrow. I then set them upside down to dry, stuck through holes in a FatTire Amber Ale box that was sitting on a wire mesh, so excess candy could still drain out of them. Once that layer of candy dried, I repeated the process to build up thicker walls. Once they were dry it was easy to cut the bones to the correct length with a little patience and a serrated blade. Before filling them with marrow, I plugged up the smaller ends with royal icing.

The marrow inside of the bones is made of lemon curd, which my sister made for me. If you haven't had it, it's kind of like a super-intense lemon pudding, and we thought it would have just the right consistency for jiggly bone marrow.

After just a few seconds in the microwave, the lemon curd was soft enough to put into a piping bag and pipe into the hollow arm bones. I also put a little fresh raspberry sauce (basically just raspberries pureed with a bit of sugar and lemon juice and strained to remove the seeds) into the piping bag because I thought that bone marrow should have some red in it. Once each bone was full, I plugged the other end with royal icing as well.

Assembling the bones of the hand took some doing. I built a form out of foam core to assemble the hand on in order to get the somewhat tented shape of a relaxed hand, then draped wax paper over that. One by one I selected bones and stuck them together by melting the ends with one of those big red lighters. Worried that this wouldn't be stable enough, I then piped royal icing over the top of the bones. In retrospect, I should perhaps have just made the bones out of royal icing in the first place. In any event, I should have given the royal icing more time to dry, because the hand wound up collapsing somewhat under the weight of the fondant skin and turned out flatter than I had hoped.

The actual meat of the arm is made of a jelly roll cake, which was easy to cut into appropriate pieces and to wrap around the arm bones. The first step in assembling the arm was to stick a layer of cake onto the previously cut foam core base for the arm, using red currant jelly. I then slathered on another layer of red currant jelly and positioned the arm and hand bones. I added yet another layer of royal icing to the hand at this point, both to attach it to the arm bones and to give it a little more thickness and dimension. Then came another layer of red currant jelly, then more jelly roll cake and even more red currant jelly. I wanted to make sure the arm looked nice and red inside when it was sliced.

I was finally ready for the nerve wracking process of skinning the arm. Or would it be unskinning the arm, since skinning usually means to remove the skin? Anyway, this was quite scary because effective skin needs a lot of subtle sculpting and texturing, but there is very limited period of time in which the fondant is still workable before it dries out. Gamely, I rolled out the fondant, and draped it over the arm. I covered the arm itself with plastic wrap to keep it moist and started with the hand, carefully trimming and pinching around the finger, adding veins and knuckles and pushing the gum paste fingernails into the soft fondant. I worked as quickly but as carefully as I could, so I could turn my attention to the arm itself. I made veins, protruding from the skin, running the length of the arm and then swiftly grabbed my blue texturing dishtowel. I was almost too late. The texture didn't come out as prominently as I had hoped, because the fondant had dried beyond the ideal texturing point, but I did get some good skin texture in places. I was content. I also pulled and frayed the skin at the back of the arm to give it that all-important violent torn away look.

Next step - coloring. Again, the build up from the purple-blue veins all the way to the white highlights. I clearly didn't learn my lesson last time because again I failed to allow sufficient dry time between coats, which resulted in a few runny spots. I cursed myself and added some brown and purple shadows to cover the imperfections.

The hair making process has been amply discussed in the Rats section, so suffice it to say that I carefully draped the arm hair in the appropriate direction, in some places almost hair by hair. Again, I overairbrushed a little when I went to make the hair brown, but at least it stuck the hair firmly down to the arm. Finally, the fingernails required some brush painting to get the subtle coloring just right. Take a look at your own fingernails; they're more complicated that you think!

And here we will leave the arm for a little while, while I move on to the base.

The Base

Obviously, it would not be very fitting to simply plop a severed arm down on a cookie sheet and call it done. No, I needed a more appropriate base.I decided to go with a sidewalk - simple enough not to distract from the central composition of arm and rats, large enough to give ample room for bloody piping gel rat footprints, apt yet non-specific enough to allow the viewer to construct the scenario of his or her choice around this glimpse of carnage.

I bought a sheet of 3/8" foamcore, figuring that the standard 3/16" foamcore that I use for the cake bases wouldn't be sturdy enough to support that many rats. After carefully studying the sidewalk in front of our house, I was ready to begin. First, I made the grout line between two sidewalk squares with some light grey icing and a large scooped decorating tip.

I mixed three different colors of royal icing to use for the small round rocks embedded in the concrete. Using two different sized round decorating tips for each color I piped dots of icing them squished them down and simultaneously textured them with a damp rag. This took much longer than I expected it to, but eventually I had a good coverage of small rocks, which had to dry before the next step.

I used a modified run in icing technique for the concrete. I made two shades of grey icing and watered them down just a bit, so they were easy to spread, but not as thin as regular run in icing. I filled a pastry bag with both colors at once to get a nice random variation of color and attached a wide, flat tip. I used the bag to fill in icing around each rock, then used a knife to spread icing in the larger areas. This took much longer than I had anticipated and I was soon cursing myself for making so many stupid little rocks.

Once that layer of icing had dried it was time to paint. In order to maker the sidewalk look distressed and dirty I went in with some black food coloring and painted stains, mostly around the grout line and around the edges. A thin black ribbon glued around the perimeter of the foamcore finished off the edge nicely.

At this point I'm in a position to describe for you the dramatic conclusion of my cake making saga, but I'm going to pause for moment and go off on a few tangents describing a few other culinary marvels of our party. Hopefully, this will heighten the tension for you and make my eventual return to the cake itself all the more enjoyable.

The Cupcakes

My sister and I were concerned that The Killer Rats Cake might not be sufficient to feed all our guests, which is exactly the opposite of the problem that we usually have with my cakes. As it turned out, we needn't have worried (we had two whole rats left at the end of the party) but to guard against the possibility of insufficient cake we decided to make supplemental cupcakes. My sister came up with the brilliant idea of making them monster cupcakes, covered in fur, with googly eyes.

Several days in advance Barbara May piped a selection of royal icing eyes onto wax paper with lots of different expressions - angry eyes, sad eyes, scary eyes, surprised eyes . . . Once they were dry she painted in little black food coloring irises.

While she was making the red velvet cakes for me to carve into rat bodies she also made several dozen red velvet cupcakes and iced them with the cream cheese icing that traditionally accompanies red velvet cake.

While I was making spun sugar for the rat fur and the arm hair I also made fur for all of the cupcakes, just scooping up a wad of spun sugar and plopping it atop each cupcake. Have you gathered yet that there was a lot of spun sugar involved in this entire operation? My sister and I did our best to clean it all off of the kitchen floor, walls, cabinets, etc., not to mention our shoes, but it wouldn't surprise me if she were still finding ants embedded in elusive deposits of sugar in various corners of her kitchen. And you should have seen the weird looking mess when we put our shoes outside on the porch because they were too sticky to leave in the house and the sugar on the soles melted in the heat into gooey, sticky puddles!

Anyway, once the cupcakes all had fur I sprayed them various bright colors with my airbrush and turned them back over to my sister to stick eyes onto. Interestingly, many of the cupcakes had entirely different facial expressions depending on the side from which they were viewed. Some seemed angry from one angle, but worried from another angle or alarmed from onside, but sad from the other. And they all looked like the bastard children of Muppets and those aliens from Critters.

All in all, they were delicious, cute, and incredibly sticky to eat. Clearly a winning combination!

The Truffles

The final culinary element of our party that I'm going to discuss here is the googly-eyed truffles. Mom had just given us about twelve pounds of fancy chocolate, so we decided to try out some new truffle recipes -brandy truffles, jasmine truffles, ginger truffles, and mint truffles. All the recipes involved soaking various things in cream for various periods of time then pouring the hot cream over chopped chocolate. This mixture is then stirred until smooth and set aside, wrapped in plastic, to cool.

The nest step is to form the centers, which turned out to be much harder than we had anticipated, since the consistency of the chocolate was, well, inconsistent. But we persevered and soon, after letting the centers sit for a bit to dry, my sister was ready to dip them all one by one into melted chocolate, an operate that requires non-sweaty hands and a lot of patience, but also satisfies the little girl inside all of us who liked to make mud pies. (My sister and I actually mud pie recipe books. Mom still has them in the scrapbook.)

In order to make the truffles appropriate to the horror theme of the party and to integrate them with the cupcakes, my sister then decided to give them all googly eyes with little dabs of white chocolate and even smaller dabs of dark chocolate for irises. This had the dual beneficial effects of making the tray of truffles just cute as the dickens and allowing our guests to distinguish between truffle flavors by the direction the eyes were looking. I don't remember which eyeball direction corresponded to which flavor, but one flavor was looking up (or down), one was looking to the side, one straight ahead, and one flavor was cross-eyed!

OK, are you all ready? Take a deep breath because it's time to return to the final chapter of The Killer Rats Cake saga! That's right; it's finally time for the assembly.

The Assembly

So here I was, the day of the party with three rats perched on the counter and a human arm safely stowed away in the refrigerator. Moving everything into place on the base was a risky operation, especially for the hand, which wasn't entirely supported by the foam core base of the arm. But with my natural manual dexterity, a flat spatula, and my sister standing by to peel wax paper off the bottoms of the rats, the transfers were all accomplished successfully. The rats lost a bit of hair off their butts when the wax paper was removed, but I stuck most of it back on and, as they were all sort of scruffy and patchy already, it made little difference.

I chose to position the rat whose mouth had remained open prominently at the end of the hand, about to chow down on the middle finger. The rat whose mouth had closed against my will I shoved up into the wrist area, so its nose was nuzzled up to the arm. I left some space between the arm and the rat with the clenched mouth so that that I was able to cut a bit of the flesh of the arm and pull out a piece of skin to put in the rat's mouth.

Now, as we all know, a rat is nothing without a nice icky tail, and since I was going to exceptionally gross rats, I made them exceptionally long, slimy tails. I made the tails out of fondant, rolled into long strands, then segmented with a plastic fondant tool. Making the tails at this late stage, with fresh, soft fondant, allowed me to drape them grotesquely over the arm and around the other rats. I think the tails really unified the piece.

While I had the fondant out I also make little feet for the rats. I then painted the tails and the feet with some paste food colors and water, varying the colors slightly from rat to rat, but mostly using reds, pinks, browns, and black.

Now, my composition was complete except for the blood. No severed arm lying on a sidewalk could be complete without copious amounts of spilled blood, so I busted out the piping gel and the red food coloring. Piping gel doesn't really taste all that good; it's just gooey sugar, but it has a great wet, glossy sheen to it. I mixed some that was a nice, deep, blood red and put it in a piping bag with a small round tip. I did the detail work first with this - little bloody rat footprints, and a blood trail from one of the rats' tails that spelled out, of course, "They're coming to get you, Barbara." I also made sure to get blood in and around each rat's mouth and into the fresh wound in the side of the wrist. Then I slathered lots of blood around and on the torn stump of the arm, washed the slimy red goo off my hands, and went to look for a cold beer.

Chocolate Rattlesnake Dragon

This was made as a Christmas present for my sister and her husband. The body is made of forty-seven chocolate cups with eleven different fillings, arranged randomly, so biting into each segment is an adventure, since there's no way of knowing what flavor it will be. Maybe there's some sort of gambling to be done here. Someone call Vegas. Speaking of which, I have a great idea for a restaurant in Vegas in which, for a fixed price, you get a pull on a slot machine to determine what you're going to get for dinner. The first reel could be the drink, then the appetizer, the side dish, the main course, and dessert. You might end up with lobster; you might end up with a BLT. Wouldn't that be fun?

Getting back to the dragon, the eleven filling flavors were golden sesame, ginger, citrus zest, green tea, red wine, wasabi, peanut butter, peppermint, coffee, orange, and cherry.

Why a dragon, you ask? Well, I reply, because that's what occurred to me. I had another idea first, involving a demonic Santa Claus playing God, holding up a DNA strand covered with the screaming heads of tormented elves, but I didn't think I'd have the time to do it right. It's too bad, because that would have been more Christmas themed. Maybe next year.

Initially, I was planning to make the body out of candies made in several sizes of peanut butter cup molds. This fell through because the peanut butter cup molds I ordered over the internet didn't arrive at my apartment in New York until after I left to spend Christmas at my sister's house in California. I therefore had to run around to candy supply stores looking for usable molds. What I found (at Michael's) were molds for those little chocolate cups that you're supposed to fill with mousse or raspberries. It was actually a blessing in disguise, as these worked better than the peanut butter cup molds ever would have. They're big enough to fit a good amount of filling and they're proportioned really well for snake segments. Peanut butter cup molds would have resulted in much squatter, less graceful snake. Of course, I now have a bunch of peanut butter cup molds and nothing to do with them.

The first step was to make all the fillings, except peanut butter, which comes ready made in a convenient jar. I recommend using some kind of natural peanut butter. I used Trader Joe's.

The peppermint, coffee, orange and cherry centers were made of center fondant, which I've made many times before. My recipe comes from The Practical Candymaking Cookbook, which I highly recommend, though I believe it is now out of print. The fondant is basically sugar, milk, and butter, cooked, then worked on a marble slab to get the right texture. I then flavored it with candy oils (except for the coffee, for which I used instant coffee as flavoring) and colored it with paste food colors.

The golden sesame, ginger, red wine, wasabi, citrus zest, and green tea were much more of an adventure, because instead of a recipe, all I had was a brochure from a high end New York candy store, which I got at the New York Chocolate Show. It had descriptions of the candies, but it wasn't like a real recipe. For instance, all the instruction I had for the ginger candy was, "Milk chocolate blended with gin-flavored ganache and ginger."

The golden sesame and ginger have a milk chocolate ganache base, which is made by boiling cream, pouring it over chopped milk chocolate, and whisking them together. For the golden sesame I added finely ground golden sesame seeds and a splash of brandy and for the ginger, finely chopped ginger root and a little gin. I determined the proportions by taste and then wasn't smart enough to write them down, so I won't know any more the next time I make them than I did this time.

The red wine and wasabi start with a dark chocolate ganache base, made the same way as the ganache with milk chocolate. I then added red wine and wasabi powder (because I couldn't find fresh wasabi root) to taste. Finally, the citrus zest and green tea are based on white chocolate ganache, flavored with orange zest (from my sister's own orange tree) and gin and with ground up green tea.

They all wound up tasting very good. I was particularly pleased with the ginger, red wine, and citrus zest. The only major problem I had was that the white chocolate-based flavors and, to a lesser extent, the milk chocolate-based flavors, were more liquid than is ideal for rolling truffle centers. This actually was no problem at all for this project, as I could just pour the liquid into the mold, but I was also using these ganaches to make rolled truffle centers, both for standard truffles and for the shrunken head truffles that I made Mom and Dad for Christmas. I think I could solve this problem next time by using less cream to make the initial ganache out of milk chocolate and white chocolate. See, I did learn something by making these, even if I didn't have the sense to write down my recipes.

With the fillings done, I was ready to make the chocolate cups themselves.The first step was to fill the mold with dark chocolate, and then set it in the fridge for one minute, so a thin, hard shell formed. Then I poured out the excess chocolate and set the molds back in the fridge to harden.

Once the chocolate shells had solidified, it was a simple matter to pour the fillings in and then pour another thin layer of chocolate on to seal off the top of the cup. Shaking the mold a bit helps to settle the chocolate on top into a flat surface. Then, back in the fridge they went to harden.

Now the fun part begins! It was time to begin adding the artistic details. For this, I found it best to use melted dark chocolate mixed with just a smidge of corn syrup. This gives the chocolate just a little more solidity so it holds its shape better. It also imparts to the chocolate a lovely dark sheen. The only drawback is that too much corn syrup will cause the whole batch of chocolate to seize up and become totally useless. I'll only admit to that happing to me twice

.I put a batch of this dark chocolate / corn syrup combo into a pastry bag with a #4 round tip and piped little dots of chocolate around the top and bottom of each cup. These made a nice visual division between the segments of the snake and also kept the cups from touching each other except around the perimeter, making it possible to break off a cup to eat without extensive damage to the neighboring cup.

Once those dots were dry (Another advantage to the corn syrup addition is that it makes the chocolate set up much more quickly.) I joined forty-six of the cups into twenty-three pairs, by sticking the wide ends of the two cups together. The remaining single cup was for the back of the head.

I was finally ready to arrange the snake on the gold foil covered cardboard cake circle I had designated as the snake's home. I chose to arrange the snake in a spiral, with the tail to be placed on the outside of the spiral and the head rising up from the center. This part went quickly, as it was a simple matter to stick the segments to each other and to the base with a little chocolate. I had to prop the head up on a few containers of luster dust until the chocolate that was holding it in place dried.

Next, the hard parts - the face and the tail. Actually, the tail wasn't all that hard. I made all of components of the head and tail on a piece of parchment paper, and then stuck them to the snake with a little more chocolate / corn syrup. The tail consisted simply of a series of rings of decreasing size. I believe I piped them with a #6 round tip. Once these dried, I stuck them together to form the rattle, and then stuck the whole thing onto the last segment of the body.

The head was more complicated. The basis was the same as the tail - a series of consecutively smaller rings, though these shrank in diameter more rapidly than those that formed the tail, resulting in a squat, roundhead. The holes in the center of the rings formed a mouth. I also made many whiskers of various sizes and shapes - some s-shapes, some curlicues, some simple swooshes.

Once all the components dried, I was ready to decorate the head. I started with the larger whiskers and worked my way down to the smaller details, basically making it up as I went. I was very happy with the result. While I was at it, I also reinforced many of the connections between the segments to make sure nothing came apart.

I applied the finishing touches with white chocolate - teeth, eyeballs, accents on the tips of the hair and beard, and little spikes on the rattle.

Once it was wrapped I was a little nervous about the head collapsing, but there was nothing I could do at that point (except unwrap it to double check, then rewrap it, which I only did once) but I was worried for nothing. In fact, it was quite sturdy. Unfortunately, my sister and her husband were leaving for Hawaii in two days, so they couldn't eat the dragon right away. We stuck him in fridge to await their return.

Little Head Truffles

These candies were made as a Christmas present for Mom and Dad. The original idea was to see whether the facial expression had a noticeable impact on the eater's enjoyment of the candy. Is it more pleasant to eat a happy face or an angry face? Does an excited face taste better than a sad face? In other words, does the emotion evinced by the candy translate into an equivalent emotion felt by the consumer? I still think this is an interesting idea to explore, but I don't think this project furthered my research much, mostly because creating a specific, distinct expression on each face turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined it would be. I basically wound up just going with whatever face emerged of its own volition. One of the truffles wound up looking like a clueless vampire.

My plan was to make two truffle heads of each of six flavors - two based on dark chocolate (red wine and wasabi), two based on milk chocolate (ginger and golden sesame), and two based on white chocolate (citrus zest and green tea). I got these flavors from a brochure for an upscale New York chocolate shop, which I got at the New York Chocolate Show. I didn't really have recipes, just descriptions, so I had to guess at all the proportions. For instance, all the instruction I had for the ginger candy was, "Milk chocolate blended with gin-flavored ganache and ginger."

All the truffles start with a ganache base, which is basically just chocolate (dark, milk, or white) mixed with hot cream and whisked until smooth. To these ganaches I added red wine, wasabi powder (I couldn't find any fresh wasabi root.), finely chopped ginger root with a little bit of gin, ground golden sesame seeds and a splash of brandy, orange zest (from an orange from my sister's own orange tree) and gin, or finely ground green tea.

They all wound up tasting very good, particularly the red wine, ginger, and citrus zest. I did, however, have a problem with the consistency of the white chocolate-based flavors and, to a lesser extent, the milk chocolate-based flavors. They were much thinner than the ideal for rolling truffle centers. I think I could solve this problem next time by using less cream.

The white chocolate-based flavors were so thin that I couldn't make them into hand-rolled truffles and would up using some nice molds I had lying around. I poured melted white chocolate into the mold, then set it in the fridge for one minute so the outer edge would set a bit. I then poured out the excess chocolate and set the mold back in the fridge to set. After a few hours the white chocolate shells were hard enough to pour in the citrus zest and green tea fillings. I then piped a layer of white chocolate on top of the filling with a #6 tip to seal off the tops. I put them back in the fridge and, once the white chocolate was set, those candies were done.

The milk chocolate-based and the dark chocolate-based ganaches were thick enough that I could roll them into centers, about 3/4" in diameter. I dipped these into tempered chocolate, corresponding to the chocolate used for the ganache centers. I then chose the nicest, roundest ones to draw faces onto.

At first I tried piping features on with straight chocolate. This proved problematic because the chocolate was too thin, making it difficult to create any detail. So I tried an experiment. Modeling chocolate is a putty-like compound made by mixing chocolate with corn syrup. It can be sculpted like clay or rolled out like dough. I thought that if I added just a smidge of corn syrup to my chocolate, I could make something in between modeling chocolate and regular chocolate, which would be thin enough that I could still pipe it with a pastry bag, but thick enough that it would hold its shape. The results of the experiment were as good as I could have hoped for! The chocolate / corn syrup combo not only held its shape better than the regular chocolate, it also set up faster and had a lovely sheen to it. The only drawback is that this can only be done in small batches because eventually it will harden inside the pastry bag and become unusable. There's also a danger of adding too much corn syrup to the chocolate, which results in the whole batch seizing up into a useless lump.

With my new discovery in hand, I piped facial features onto two of each dark chocolate flavor and two of each milk chocolate flavor. Naturally, I used milk chocolate for the milk chocolate truffles and dark chocolate for the dark chocolate truffles. At this point I did try to shoot for specific facial expressions, but to a large extent the chocolate simply did what it would. I think I could do better in controlling the chocolate with a little more practice.

With the major facial shapes done, I added hair, facial hair, and eyebrows using dark chocolate on the milk chocolate truffles and milk chocolate on the dark chocolate truffles. I then used white chocolate for details like eyes and teeth. It was at this point that one of them emerged as a vampire because the perimeter teeth came out longer than center teeth.

For some reason, one and only one of them developed blooms, a surface discoloration to which poorly tempered chocolate is prone, so he appeared to have some sort of skin condition on his forehead.

Thorax Cake

The Thorax Cake - grossing out the internets since 2003.

I generally make a bleeding heart cake for our annual pumpkin carving party (Pumpkinfest). Sometimes the heart beats, sometimes it's anatomically correct, and so on and so forth. This year I decided to go the whole hog and make an entire thoracic cavity cake. The plan was for each organ to be made out of a different kind of cake and to secrete a different color of fluid when it was cut into. Previous heart cakes have bled fresh, homemade raspberry sauce. This year I made raspberry, strawberry, kiwi, mango, and blueberry sauces. Sadly, the organs didn't bleed as well as I had hoped when I cut the cake, as each organ was relatively small and couldn't hold much sauce. Also all the moving around after filling the organs made it hard to keep the sauce contained in the little cavities I hollowed out. The heart bled pretty well, but the other organ fluids weren't very dramatic. On the bright side, there were lots of leftover sauces, which were all quite delicious. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My intended organ-cake-sauce combinations were as follows.

Heart - orange cake with raspberry sauce

Lungs - apple spice cake with strawberry sauce

Kidneys - orange cake with blueberry sauce

Stomach - ginger cake with mango sauce

Liver - chocolate cake with kiwi sauce

Small Intestine - jelly roll with red currant jelly

Unfortunately the liver suffered a complete structural failure when I tried to transfer into place within the rib cage, so it had to be eliminated from the presentation. I like to think that the liver was the tastiest bit and so whoever ripped this unfortunate man apart (My sister thinks it was Klingon because it was slightly larger than life size, but I'm not sure Klingons have the same internal organ structure.) ate the liver first before it ever got to our pumpkin party.

After baking all the different types of cakes, I carved them into the shapes of the appropriate organs, using my handy Gray's Anatomy as a reference.

I then flipped each organ over, hollowed out a cavity in the center and frosted the inside of the cavity and the underside of the cake with buttercream frosting. After spooning in the fruit sauces, I sealed the cavities with a layer of fondant icing and flipped the organs back over. The heart and the lungs I covered with white modeling chocolate and the kidneys and stomach I covered with fondant icing. Both had their advantages and their disadvantages. White modeling chocolate tastes better than fondant and it sticks to itself better than fondant, but it's more difficult to work with on cakes like these which were relatively unstable due to the hollows in the middle. Also, modeling chocolate is difficult to paint with paste food coloring, which is what I usually use. It can be painted easily with powdered food coloring, but I didn't have any cocoa butter to dissolve the powder in. The fondant is easy to roll out and wrap around the cake and very easy to paint but it doesn't hold sculptural detail as well as modeling chocolate.

At this point, I took a break from the cakes in order to assemble the white chocolate rib cage in which all the organs were to be placed.

I tempered white chocolate chips in the microwave and piped ribs and vertebrae onto acetate with a plastic piping bag. I drew ribs onto paper which I placed underneath the acetate to insure that the ribs would be the same shape and the right size.

Dipping each piece into a bowl of melted white chocolate, it was relatively easy to assemble the rib cage on a silver tray. (The tray's last use was for passing out cookies at my sister's wedding.) Of course, with all the organs on top of it, virtually no one ever actually saw the fact that there was a complete spinal column underneath all the cake so some might say there was a bit of wasted effort there, but I say if you're going to make an edible, anatomically correct chest cavity dessert tray, you might as well do it right!

Once the rib cage was dry, I placed all the organs except the liver in the appropriate places inside it (again using Gray's Anatomy as a guide. This is, by the way, the only use that Gray's Anatomy ever sees in our household.)

It was at this point that I realized the liver was beyond salvaging. (I had problems with the liver from the moment I tried to take it out of the cake tin.)

I'm not really sure what colors kidneys and stomachs and such are supposed to be, but, drawing on my vast experience watching people in movies being disemboweled, I gave it my best shot.

I'm not sure how accurate the results were, but they were definitely gross.

At this point my sister came home from a party and helped me move the cake to its final location so I could attach the intestine, which was to be trailing out of the rib cage so as to suggest that the person to whom the thorax had belonged had been ripped apart, rather than carefully dissected.

I bent the jelly roll (which I was quite proud of; I'd never made that kind of cake before and I sometimes have problems with whipping eggs. Fortunately, I was visiting my mom recently and she told me that it's very important the mixer and bowl be very clean and perfectly dry or the egg whipping won't work, so I didn't have any problems at all this time. Thanks, Mom!) into appropriate curves and covered it with white chocolate. I was, by this point, out of both kinds of frosting, lacked the ingredients to make more, and it was four o'clock in the morning so I couldn't get any more. That's why I just used plain white chocolate to cover the intestine. It looked fine, but was pretty difficult to paint, again because I lacked cocoa butter and so couldn't use the powdered food colors.

All that was left was to add the buttercream frosting blood, so it wouldn't look so pristine.

I did little veins on the organs first with a piping bag, then put big globs of gore on the ribs with a knife. A little spritz of corn syrup to give it that all-important oozing, wet look and I was done!

Tragically, the next day was very hot and, as white chocolate melts at about 95 degrees Farenheit, this caused major structural failure of the rib cage. By the time our guests arrived for Pumpkinfest, the rib cage had collapsed almost completely. It was nice and stable in the middle of the night when it was cool, though, I swear! So we put a photo of it in its original state up on the computer monitor. Actually, even with the rib cage broken, it looked pretty gruesome and neat, but it was better before. As I mentioned before, the cutting of the cake was not as dramatic as I had hoped, but, considering that I make all this up as I go along, I think the whole project didn't go too badly at all. And everyone said the cakes and sauces were all delicious, despite the excessive amounts of frosting required for this sort of project.

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.