It's Halloween! A ghoulish cake

The competition was for scariest dessert.  I knew I had it, hands down, with this skull cake.  ...  You know what won?  A kitty litter cake.  PLEASE!  She threw together a few packaged ingredients!  What says "Halloween" about a "cake" made to look like a box of kitty litter?  Nothing.  The reason she won was because about 25 of her co-workers applauded for her and the winning entry was based on noise level.  It was a damn close call, even so.  And I'm not bitter at all.

Just look at this amazing creation!

Sigh.  If only it hadn't been so much work.  Almost everything that could have gone wrong, did.  I bought cake mix because I figured it was fool proof.  I don't make many cakes so I don't have a preferred recipe.  I got strawberry with the idea of mixing a little black food coloring to make a sort of gross, grayish pink, inside-the-skull color.  Well, I added too much black, which frighteningly made it look just like chocolate.  (Tells you something about artificially flavored desserts, doesn't it?  It even tasted like chocolate. And that tells you something about tasting with our eyes first.) Then the cake face stuck in the pan.  (WHY do we have to grease and flour a "non-stick" pan???  And then it sticks anyway.)  After much fussing, it came out... or part of it did.  The actual face stuck firm.  I managed to pry it all out in a few pieces and put it back together.

         

                                           Yes folks, that is a strawberry cake.

I wanted to use the cooked flour frosting I've used before, which I really like, but I decided to add a little cream cheese, thinking it would create a firmer product.  (Cream cheese is firmer at room temperature than butter.)  What a disaster.  I can only assume that was the cause of the frosting refusing to firm up at all.  No matter how much I whipped it, it stayed runny.  Like soup.  By then I was exhausted and had to go to bed, so I threw a towel over the cakes, hoping they wouldn't dry out too much, and stuck the soup in the refrigerator, hoping the chill would help.

The next day, the frosting was firm, but as soon as I started mixing it, it went back to soup.  Advice on the interwebs was to add sugar (gross), DON'T add sugar, add meringue powder, chill it, add more butter...  I added some sugar and some meringue powder to no avail.  I went out and bought canned stuff for emergency backup but the ingredient list grossed me out and I couldn't bring myself to use it.  I started over with fresh butter, then slowly added the soup, and that way managed to get a usable frosting.  By this time I'd spent all morning and was due at the luncheon in 30 minutes.  I started decorating. 

I glued the face together with frosting, and then the two halves.  When I used this skull pan for a Guy Fawkes cake, I had no trouble with the face sliding off, but this time it did.  I had to prop it up with more cake under the chin.  I used gummy eyeballs, one hanging by licorice laces (from a booger-filled eye socket), licorice lace hair, and candy corn teeth.  Then I dripped a little green icing slime from eyeballs and teeth.  The final touch was the meat cleaver (which I would have liked to have embedded in the skull but was afraid it wouldn't hold up.)

In the end, not only did the cake not win, but it didn't even hardly get eaten.  People didn't know how to cut into it, even though I got it started by slicing off the top of the head.  They want to cut it like a regular cake, but that gets you either little frosting or most of it.  So it got destroyed.  Making it look even scarier.