Graveyard Cake

by Jewel Goodwin
(Vancouver, BC, Canada)

You can turn any flat rectangular cake into a graveyard with some candies, decorating gel, a little bit of creativity. Here’s what you need:

Rectangular cake, baked according to instructions
Dark brown icing
White icing (the whiter the better – careful because some vanilla icing is off-white)
Red decorating gel
Black decorating gel
Oblong Sandwich cookies
Spooky candies (I got a coffin full of bones at a local candy store)

Once your cake has cooled, ice it with the dark brown icing. Use your decorating gels to write things on the top half of the cookies, like ‘RIP’ or ‘BOO’. I also drew bats and pumpkins. I also used the black decorating gel to cover the white icing otherwise showing from the sandwich cookies. Push the bottom part of the cookies into the cake, so that the cookies are standing up, resembling tombstones.

If you have a decorating bag, use your biggest tip. If you don’t have a bag, snit the corner off of a plastic baggie, and use that to pipe the white icing. Pipe the white icing in piles, starting bigger and ending in a pointed top – these are your ghosts. Use your red and black gel to put eyes on your ghosts. Pipe them randomly around your tombstones.

If you have any candies like bones, spiders, or worms, sprinkle them in the brown icing.

Voila!