Vampire Cake. (October 2001)

Dan bought me the Wilton "Smiling Skull" pan as a gift. He left it in the oven for me to find. I was totally surprised. I love Dan. With the pan come instructions on how to decorate a cake as a vampire, too. So I thought it would be a great idea to make one for the little party at Joe and Mike's place for the season premiere of "Buffy." Unfortunately, I ended up not having time to bake it, because I was working on the Goodnight Moon cake, but I thought I'd make it for the season premiere of "Charmed" instead. Better late than never.

The cake fit nicely on a 14" board. It was actually a fairly simple cake to decorate. It's mostly just purple stars covering the face. i had to build the nose manually, by building up stars on top of each other in the shape of a nose. For the hair, rather than set aside a separate amount of icing to dye black, I just mixed together all my leftover icing and added black food coloring until it was dark enough.

Problems: So I made a cake mix, poured it into the pan, put it in the oven, and suddenly realized I hadn't put the eggs in!! So I quickly took it back out, poured the mix back into my mixer, and added the eggs. It seemed to turn out just fine in the end.