How To Make A Halloween Cake For The Kids

What you will need: For the cake - 26cm/10inch round cake tin

12 oz organic butter, softened
12 oz caster sugar
16 oz self raising flour
3 oz cocoa
6 large free range eggs
50 ml milk

For the filling and topping -

400g Nutella or Hazelnut Spread
10 oz organic butter, softened
22 oz Icing/confectioners sugar
Red & Yellow or Orange food colouring
Marzipan
Black sugar paste
Orange sugar paste
A tube of black icing

How To Make A Halloween Cake For The Kids

I can’t tell you how funny it’s been here in the office sorting through the pictures of this cake. We’ve been comparing the shape of our sugar paste spiders to crab and octopus anything but spiders of course! And then there was the case of the less than orange Halloween icing that made the cake look more like a giant peach than the scary creation we were aiming for!

This seriously got me thinking. There is so much out there online and in print that tells us how to cook, bake, craft, sew, keep house etc!!
I’m one of them for goodness sake. But it is really important to me to say that if it ever appears that we have it all sewn up here at Chez Menlove that appearance is 100% false. If I could only tell you the amount of expletives that fall like a torrent from my mouth each and every time I burn the inside of my arm on the Aga! Or the recipes that we test that have us spitting them out in the sink! Hahahahahahahaha! It doesn’t happen daily, granted, but it happens. And when it does we have one of two choices.

Get annoyed and swear even more.

Or shake our head in dismay, laugh ( a lot ) and then put it up on to the site anyway because even if the cake is a little more apricot in appearance than we’d have liked it tastes extraordinary and that’s all that matters with cake because you don’t look at them you EAT them and the cake recipe works.

Pre-heat your oven to 190c, you will find a weight conversion chart here.

I used a food mixer to mix my cake ingredients but you could also mix this cake by hand.

Start by mixing together the butter and the sugar until it is smooth and creamy
Sift in the flour and then add the eggs, cocoa and milk, mix all the ingredients together until completely blended
Pour the mixture into the greased cake tin and bake in the oven for 1 hr 15 minutes, making sure you keep an eye on it
Remove the cake from the oven and allow to cool completely before the next part

Using a long sharp knife, slice the cake in half width ways so you end up with two circles of cake

Generously spread the Nutella (hazelnut chocolate spread) on to the top of the inside of the cake
Put the other half of the cake back on top and press down gently to secure in place

For the cake icing and decorations -

Mix together the butter and the icing sugar and add the food colouring to get your desired colour of orange
The topping should be thick and stand up on its own, not runny

Using a pallet knife, spread the orange butter icing all over the cake, including over the sides, until it is completely covered

For the cake decorations I used black sugar paste to make the spiders but coloured marzipan would also work for this
I started by rolling out a small black ball (about the size of a marble) for the crab’s spider’s body
Then rolled out four long legs which I attached to the middle of the underside of the crab’s spiders body
I also gave him some orange eyes which I just rolled out of orange sugar-paste.