Happy Spider Halloween Cake

Happy Sunday! I'm on vacation this week and next but I'm sharing easy cake ideas for your upcoming parties! This week is Halloween!

You would think this cake would be hard but it wasn't...not at all! The base cake is just a round four inch cake that I didn't level off the dome and covered in fondant "scales" (just round pieces of fondant layered over each other to cover the cake). The face is just a ding dong covered in fondant and attached with dowels and buttercream to the body! The legs are just fondant mixed with tylose then allowed to dry over night after forming them into legs and then attached using water as glue. The hat is a cardboard cone that was covered with colored strips of fondant. The hardest part of the cake was figuring out how to draw the face on so it would show up and not be scary! So if you are thinking about stretching your cake skills with a "carved" or "character" cake then this is the one for you to give a try!

As mentioned before, I do make my own marshmallow fondant and this was no different. I just made it chocolate fondant by using cocoa powder in place of some of the powdered sugar. Learning how to work with fondant is a challenge and can take some time to learn what is the perfect texture and how to correct it if the texture is off in some way. SO for a beginner, who has not learned or is still learning how to make their own fondant, I highly recommend Duff Goldman's brand of fondant at Michaels. It tastes good and is really easy to work with. It is a "soft" fondant which means if you want to make any of your pieces hard to stand up, like the legs on this spider, then you will want to mix in a LOT of tylose and let the pieces set up for at least a week, two weeks if you have the time. But for a beginner this is just the easiest fondant to use for covering a cake. As with any pre-made packaged item, it is expensive. I can make my own chocolate fondant for about $5 and Duff's is priced at $20. So make sure to use that Michaels 40% or, even better, 50% off coupons to help with the cost of this fondant. I use this fondant whenever I need a bright or dark color, other than brown, for a cake. So if you see red or black or navy blue fondant on one of my cakes chances are it's Duffs!

If you are brave, want to learn how to make marshmallow fondant and learn how to work with it just comment here and I'll happily let you know how to make it! Or message me on FaceBook! You can find us at www.facebook.com/thecherryontopevents on FaceBook.

Have a great week! See you next Sunday!

Cat