Jack Skellington Cake
Vanilla cake-9-inch round 2-layer vanilla cake with white frosting (canned, ::sigh::), decorated with black Wilton Sparkle piping gel.
Cookie Monster Cookie Cake
9-inch round 2-layer Toll House chocolate chip cookie "cake" with vanilla frosting, decorated with blue "jimmies" for fur, melted white chocolate with chocolate melt for eyes, melted dark chocolate for mouth and half of a chocolate chip cookie (again, Toll House recipe) for his special cookie treat.
Cake Walk, part...oh, I don't know, I've lost count! These (and two other cakes I forgot to take pictures of, darn it!) were made for the Halloween festival at the school I taught at last year. Without turning this into a very special episode of Oprah, let's just say last October was a really tough month at work, so the need for a creative outlet was priority for my mental health. Cake to the rescue!
My affinity for The Pumpkin King is fairly well known, there are rumors (which I'll deny!) that a squeal of joy flew from my mouth when the artist told us that we would be drawing Jack for our Animation Academy session at Disney California Adventure. Also, Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas allows me to prolong one of my favorite holidays well into my other favorite holiday! What better way to celebrate Halloween than a Jack cake? It was super simple, I don't even think I had to trim it other than leveling the tops before stacking. The fun was in bringing him to life with that signature smirk. I must commend Wilton for this stroke of genius, their Sparkle piping gels are so much fun! I've used them before (see *Vroom, Vroom!*, *Setting Sail* and *That's A Spicy Meatball*) and the black adds just enough glitz befitting a king.
*FUN FACT!* The kids running the cake walk got a late start and rather than let winners pick their own cake, the cake for each round was on display as chosen by them. Amazingly, Jack was never chosen and I got to bring him home with me-a la "kill 2 birds with 1 stone", as I had company arriving that evening for a Halloween party, so now I didn't have to create dessert too! However, something tragic happened on the way home...Jack's face got stuck to the lid of the box and he lost an eye and part of his mischievous smile! I debated leaving it and just turning him into Pirate Jack, but thought better of it and touched him up just in time for the doorbell to ring-whew!
Now, as much as I adore the works of Mr. Burton, something that captured my heart early on were Jim Henson's Muppets. Last fall, I got to attend Disney's D23 Expo and had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet Fozzie, Gonzo and Pepe. A few glitches aside, I ended up with a rather amuzing conversation with Gonzo and a pic with my devastatingly awful phone camera. I walked away from the experience with misty eyes and a goofy smile, check that one off the bucket list!
I saw a picture (via Google image search) of Cookie Monster cupcakes, which I duplicated and also tweaked to make Oscar the Grouch cupcakes as well for our Happy 40th Birthday Sesame Street party in my classroom. But now it was Halloween and what's Halloween without a monster. I know Cookie has recently changed his "diet" to say that cookies are a "sometimes food", whatever they need to tell themselves on 123 Sesame Street is fine by me, but my Cookie Monster will always feast upon a buffet of delicious cookies.
I'll tell you a secret-this "cake" isn't actually a cake! It's actually a Toll House cookie! (No! YES!) Made from the recipe on every bag of Toll House morsels, I simply put the dough into 2 9-inch round pans. Once baked, I simply frosted it just like I would a cake, pressed blue "jimmies" into the frosting and melted some chocolate disks for the eyes and mouth. *HOT TIP* if you don't have a microwave (like me!) you can cheat by placing the melting disks into a squeeze bottle, wrapping it in a really damp kitchen towel, wrapping that in foil and placing on a cookie sheet or in a Pyrex pan in the oven on low-say 250 for about 15 minutes, reheating as necessary. I have one of those Wilton chocolate melting pots, but for a job this small, it's not worth the clean up. The cookie I jammed in his mouth is simply a cookie I baked separately from the same batch of dough, cut in half and "glued" with the dark chocolate I used for his mouth.
The other two cakes which are M.I.A., were a candy corn-shaped cake with sugar sprinkles in white, yellow and orange (of course!) and a sugar "cookie pizza" which had all sorts of Halloween candy pieces and chocolate melt drizzles in green and orange. Not taking a picture of those is regrettable and I haven't the slightest idea as to why I didn't snap photos of them. Probably fatigue as I made all 4 cakes in about 48 hours. So you'll just have to trust me when I tell you they were awesome!
In the immortal (get it? immortal, because he's a skeleton!) words of Jack, the Pumpkin King:
"Happy Halloween Everybody!"