Halloween Graveyard Cake

This are instructions on how to make a graveyard cake for halloween complete with buried bodies for people to find

To do this you need lots of ingredients

First you need a large sponge cake

I made one using the recipe described on downsizer.net

My roasting tin which is 36cm by 26cm and about 5cm deep took a 9 egg version of the above sponge mix which I made chocolate flavour. I used a roasting tin as to achieve a sensible effect with the graves the cake needed to be quite deep. When filled the tin was half to 2/3rds full and it took 1hr to cook at 180/gas mark 4. As the article says this can vary from oven to oven so I would start checking it after about 45-50minutes. When cooked it should stop making noise and a stick/knife should come out relatively clean.

You also need

Icing

100-150g butter
100-150g Icing sugar
Green food colouring

Decorations

Digestive biscuits crushed to replicate gravel
Gravestone shaped biscuits
Pink Wafer biscuits
Jelly Babies
Jelly worms
Marshmallow ghosts
Red Jam
Candy sticks to replicate bones
Chocolate mice
mushroom sweets
Supercook writing icing (You get 4 colours in small tubes for about £2 you could achieve the same effect with coloured icing and piping bags)
Cocktail sticks

So I started with a sponge cake.

I used paper to vague plan where the gravestones and mausoleum were going to go

I used a small paring knife to cut the graves out. Being fairly careful with the sponge being removed as some of it would need to be put back.

The graves were then marked using cocktail sticks so once iced they could be located then filled with either jelly babies or strawberry jam and candy sticks.

Some of the removed cake was put back into the holes to allow them to be iced though one grave was left open.

The icing was made with softened butter, green food colouring and icing sugar, they were mixed together to form a paste which tasted more of sugar than butter and dyed with green food colouring untill it would go no more green.

As I said in the ingredients list I used about 100-150gs of butter and icing sugar but this may vary depending on the size of your cake etc

Then the green icing was spread over the cake.

Now I marked a path to a mausoleum I was building from pink wafer biscuits.

Then I started writing on the biscuits to be gravestones various things like RIP or In Loving Memory.

When the gravestones were placed I removed the cocktail stick and used a knife to make a small incision in which to place the biscuit before pressing down.

The mausoleum was constructed from several pink wafer biscuits. This could be prised apart so the writing was done on thinner pieces then stuck onto the side using icing.

Probably about a biscuits worth of crushed digestive biscuit was used to line the path.

It was pressed down into the green icing to ensure it remained stuck down.

I used cocktail sticks to place ghosts around the graveyard and just pressed the other sweets into the icing.

The cake was lovely and served about 25 people