Halloween Cake

“Instead of screams, I swear, I can hear music in the air… The smell of cakes and pies is absolutely everywhere” – Jack in The nightmare before Christmas, one of my favorite movie, especially at this time of the year.  Well, the smell of cake and pies is everywhere almost every week in my apartment, not only at Christmas or Halloween. This year, I chose to make a chocolate cake filled with coconut mousse and covered with melted chocolate, Oreo biscuits, white chocolate bones, a milk chocolate tombstone and fake worms made of white fondant. For the decoration, I had planned to make meringue bones and jelly worms but looking at the amount of sugar needed for the cake, I thought it would be a bit too much.

Ingredients : 

Chocolate cake:

• 200 gr of soft butter
• 4 eggs
• 200 gr of sugar
• 160 gr of flour
• ½ bag of baking powder (5-6 gr)
• 40 gr of cacao powder

Coconut mousse:

• 170 gr of mascarpone
• 100 gr of sweetened condensed milk
• 50 gr of rasped coconut

Decoration :

• 250 gr of dark chocolate
• 50 gr of white chocolate + 50 gr of milk chocolate
• 1 pack of Oreo cookies
• 10 gr of fondant

Begin with the chocolate cake.

Cut the butter in small pieces and put it in the bowl of your kitchen robot. Add the sugar and mix it at average speed (using the edge beater if you have one). Add the eggs one by one but mix well between each egg.

Between 2 eggs, you can preheat the oven at 200°C.

Stop the robot and sift the flour, the cacao powder and the baking powder directly on the butter/sugar mix. Mix first with a spatula and then you can start again the robot. Mix until everything is well incorporated.

Grease a souffle mold (or any mold with high sides and with a diameter around 15-18 cm). The cake will be cut in half for the mousse so it needs to be high.

Pour the dough in the mold. It will be a bit thick and won’t spread evenly but that’s ok, it will spread while cooking.

Bake it 20 min at 200°C and then 45 min at 150°C (I used the rotating heating mode). Check if the cake is cooked enough. Leave it in the oven a bit longer if needed.

Let it cool down a bit before trying to remove it from the mold. Then let it cool down completely on a rack.

If you want to do the same decoration as I did (bones and tombstone), do it while the cake is cooking. Just melt the chocolates au bain-marie (or in the microwave) and fill in the molds. Place them in the fridge to set until the last moment. The mold I used is from the brand Wilton. I found it in a specialised shop but you can find it on the Internet.

Once the cake is completely cooled down, prepare the coconut mousse.

With your kitchen robot, whip the mascarpone and the sweetened condensed milk. When it gets the texture of a mousse, stop the robot and add the rasped coconut. Mix with a spatula.

Cut the cake in half in the length and spread the coconut mousse on the base of the cake. Then place the top part of the cake and press gently. The mousse will most likely come out on every side so just make it even with a spatula.

Put the cake in the fridge.

For the decoration, melt the 250 gr of dark chocolate au bain-marie. While it is melting, prepare the Oreo biscuits by separating the cookie part from the cream. Remove as much cream as possible with a knife. Put the biscuits in a zipping bag and crush the cookies using a dough roll. You should obtain soothing that really looks like dirt so don’t crush it too thin.

Pour the chocolate on the cake and spread it on the cake with a spatula. It does not have to be pretty… it’s Halloween, right?

Then spread the Oreo dirt on the chocolate.  If you made the bone and tombstone, keep some spaces without Oreo dirt so that they can stick to the chocolate. For the tombstone, I dug a hole on top of the cake and dip the tombstone in some melted chocolate to be sure she will not fall.

For the worms : take a very small amount of white fondant and simply roll it in the sape of worms. Then place them on the cake. If you still have some Oreo dirt, add a little bit of it on the ends of the worms to make it look like they are coming out of the ground.

If you don’t serve the cake right away, keep it in the fridge but I recommend to leave it at room temperature 1 or 2 hours before serving.

Bon appétit !