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:

I used a chocolate buttercream icing recipe from Peggy Weaver (I used cocoa), for the filling and I really liked the consistency. It was firm but tasty and held up very well to the weight of the fondant and decorations. I also used one of Peggy's Buttercream Icing Recipe I under her Marshmallow Fondant. The fondant was great!! Apart from the mess I made, the fondant was really easy to make and best of all, it tasted so yummy!! While my friends liked the buttercream, it just wasn't quite for me. While I had no problem enjoying the half butter half Crisco combo in the chocolate recipe, the regular recipe also calls for almond, butter, and vanilla extract. The combination just wasn't right for me and I will continue to look for that perfect buttercream recipe.

I was really excited with the way the decorations came out though. The cake was covered in fondant and the decorations were made with fondant, icing, and those chocolate candy melts. I measured and sketched out templates for each part of the decoration so I could make sure to fit everything on the way I wanted.

The moon, pumpkin patch and cemetery pieces were shaped from fondant and painted with food coloring gel. Once they were mixed with vodka the gel colors mixed and painted nicely on the fondant, but they did take quite a while to dry. For the most part, I just wet the backs of the pieces to bond it with the background, but the pumpkins were a bit too heavy and I used toothpicks to help secure them.

For the hill I mixed the black & purple coloring right into the fondant and it took quite a bit of kneading to get a consistent color. That's when I decided to leave the rest of the pieces white and just paint them. To give the hill the nice texture you see in the movie, I beat it up a bit with a pizza cutter, hitting it hard enough to get a textured groove with out cutting right through it.

For Jack Skellington and Zero, I made myself a template of the basic size and shape I wanted at put it under some wax paper. Then with the chocolate candy melts I made my shapes. Jack was particularly difficult to pick up once he hardened and I ended up having to position one of the arms that had fallen off back where it should be once I put him on the cake.

Here are some shots of the details: