Plate to Plate

Normally I don’t go for Halloween festivities. I’m an old curmudgeon, I don’t like candy, and costumes weird me out. But a few years ago — realizing now that it’s been…five years, actually — there was a Halloween-themed potluck at the publishing company where I was working at the time, so I begrudgingly got into the spirit and whipped up a graveyard cake.

Surely you don’t think I have a recipe, do you? It’s been five years, afterall, and three moves. Luckily, the cake is easy enough to make. It’s a two-tiered chocolate cake with espresso buttercream icing. The graves are just Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, and the lettering and skulls are written with black cake decorating gel. The grass around the graves is shredded coconut, colored with green food dye. What you can’t see, and what was really gross about the cake, I think, is the big, fat gummy worms I put between the two layers. Because of course there are worms down there in those graves. (You can see the gummy worm bag tossed inelegantly in the background there. I sure knew how to stage a photo then, didn’t I? Top notch.)

Happy spooking this weekend!