it's almost halloween, right?

the hub asked me recently how he could get his hands on a cake shaped like frankenstein's head to bring into the shop.  i dunno, some sort of inside joke with one of the regulars.  boys.  i don't get them sometimes.  okay, a lot.  heh.

anyway, my mind immediately went to bakeries and my friend A who makes beautiful custom cakes - but who also has a brand new baby - and then did a little googling and decided that i could probably pull it off.  i mean, how hard could it be, right?  like this:

so i told him i'd take care of it.  with no particular preference for flavor, the bean and i decided that it needed to be red velvet so that when they cut into it, it looked like blood.  ha!

i was totally doing this at the very last minute, and with my favorite cake supply store closed for the day, i had to macgyver up a decent cake board using a box that had been delivered from target, a shitton of shipping tape, and some plain old foil.

when the cake was done (using a mix i had on hand.  they're a bunch of dudes smoking cigars, they don't care if it's from scratch or not) and cooled completely, i sliced little bits off of the sides to give it some shape.

i mixed up some cream cheese buttercream frosting and stirred in some food coloring.  i don't do a lot of cakes and wasn't entirely sure if the dye would change the texture of the frosting, but it seemed to be okay.  i didn't have the time nor the patience to do a crumb coat, so there were a few random crumbs that got mixed in.  i think i got most of them out, though, and after a little more smoothing with my offset spatula i had this:

he looks really crooked here, but i hadn't done the hair part yet.  i piped on an uneven line with frosting tinted black, filled it in, and then got to work on his face.  that was the easy part.  for his eyes, i remembered that i had a bag of candy melts from christmas that were peppermint-flavored.  i knew they'd work perfectly, because they were white with little red specks throughout...so they would look like bloodshot eyes.  i didn't even bother with a decorating bag or tips for the face - i threw some frosting into a ziploc and snipped off the corner, like i used to before i got into the cookie decorating thing.  a few more details, and voila:

never mind that his nose looks like a...well, never mind.  the hub was super happy with my efforts, and reported back that the cake was a huge success with the guys.  NAILED IT.