As much as I adore cake, I've never been particularly good at baking them or decorating them for that matter. My expertise is definitely more in the pastry and cheesecake area and my previous exploits in cake making for the most part have been a disaster. I've had an idea for my birthday cake swimming around in my head for a while, but since I was not so confident in my ability to actually make it happen, I decided to use Halloween and my dear friends as guinea pigs for some decoration and icing experimentation.

I had a vision of what my Nightmare Before Christmas cake should look like, but I was pretty undecided what it should taste like. My emphasis here was most definitely more on looks than taste, so I ended up modifying a cake mix (Gasp!) with some white chocolate and Kahlua to give it a little flavor, but that's about all. Here's what I ended up with: