Early Halloween

Chocolate fondant inspired this early Halloween themed cake. I'd bought two pounds of chocolate fondant for the final class wedding cake, but I'd already made up my mind that if I had enough left over, I would make something Halloween-themed because the light-on-dark look suited it.

I got a set of Halloween cookie cutters after hunting around for a right-shaped ghost cutter. I knew I wanted one that ended in a tail rather than the wavy bottom reminiscent of the ghosts in Pacman. This was a bit bigger than I intended; I'd originally wanted a ton of ghosts swarming the tombstone greeting. At first, I tried rolling out the chocolate fondant and then making the cut-outs and replacing them with white inlays. But I couldn't get it right, I couldn't find a way to glue the seams or get the white fondant to bond with the chocolate. After a couple of attempts, I gave up and ended up just sticking the ghosts on. I was reminded in class the following week that I had indeed talked to my teacher about this, and she had suggested laying the chocolate fondant on the cake first, and then making cut-outs directly on the cake. Oops. I think if the cut-outs were smaller, my initial method might have worked.

Another lesson learnt was the tombstone. Originally, I meant for it to be standing up but I didn't allow sufficient time for it to dry and it ended up cracking and breaking when it slipped from my fingers at one point. I did the flooding with royal icing, because it's what I had on hand. Apparently the difference between royal icing and Color Flow is that royal icing will dry matte while Color Flow is a little shiny. The eyes and mouths were done with edible marker.