Ghoulish Graveyard Halloween Cake

With Halloween and All Souls' Day this week I made this Ghoulish Graveyard Halloween Cake. It was fun to make and would be great to bake and decorate with kids. It would also be perfect for a Halloween party.

The recipe for this cake is from BBC GoodFood and you can find it here. It is easy to make as it's just a basic chocolate sponge cake recipe made in a 20 x 30cm tin. The resultant sponge was light and tasty. Once cool, the whole cake is covered in chocolate buttercream. I put my cake on a rectangular cake board and then covered the board in buttercream too and put a black ribbon around the edge. Alternatively if you have an appropriately sized slate or granite board this would look good too, or you could cover your cake board in black sugarpaste.

The gravestone biscuit recipe is also included on the BBC website. They are made with soft light brown sugar and lots of golden syrup. You can cut your shapes out freehand or you can also cut them out in cardboard first and use this as a template. I used a cereal box to make my templates. To add the details I used royal icing piped with a size 2 nozzle.

To construct the cake you just need some Matchmakers, Oreo cookies and some Halloween jelly sweets. The jelly sweets are usually available in supermarkets and Haribo make good ones around Halloween time. The Matchmakers should be snapped at various lengths and then pushed into the buttercream around the edge of the cake. To make the soil on top whizz the Oreos in a food processor (or you can bash them with a rolling pin in a plastic bag), when it's a fairly fine crumb, sprinkle them on top.

Finally, push the gravestones gently into the cake and add the jelly sweets for a bit of colour and to complete the ghoulish graveyard look.

Spooky Halloween Cookies

To celebrate Halloween I made these easy biscuits with royal icing. Once you've baked your biscuits, mix up some royal icing and pipe an outline around your design as in the picture... it doesn't look pretty at this stage but the final product is a really great looking biscuit, or cookie if you will! Once you've edged your biscuits cou can then make your icing slightly runnier by adding a bit more water and then flood fill the biscuit using a piping bag with the end snipped off. You can use this to push the icing right up to the edging. If you want to make your biscuits even more special you can pipe contrasting colours on to the base layer icing and they blend in to each other like the eyes on the ghost!

Why not try some spooky cupcakes too! There are loads of great cupcake toppers available if you want some quick and easy decorations... team them with bright orange and green icing! These are some mini cupcakes from Lola's which a friend had for her Halloween party.