Lombardo Lagniappe: Two Halloween Cakes

I know it's well past Halloween now, and honestly I didn't even want to put these on here because they're not my best work. But I figured It would be best to show all my cakes, not just the ones that I'm actually happy with. I had high hopes for both these cakes, but the time that I gave myself to make them was not nearly enough, and I ran into a couple other problems as well. First up the pumpkin cake.

I used 2 bundt cakes. The top was spice cake with pumpkin filling and the bottom was chocolate cake with coconut filling.

I wanted to make a cake for Joe to take to work for Halloween. This cake should have been simple enough since I've made a similar one before. The only difference was that this time I decided to cover the cake in fondant and that is where my main problem was. I just could not get it rolled out smooth! I kneaded it for what felt like forever and it still didn't soften up very well. So when I tried to roll it out and place it over the cake, it kept cracking. After three tries, I decided that I didn't care if it cracked. I'd just patch it up as best as I could. The color of the fondant was also a little off, and the cake didn't show the ridges as well as I'd hoped, so I ended up hand painting the entire thing. In a last ditch effort to make it look somewhat like a pumpkin, I formed a stem and vine (a really ugly vine) out of fondant and hand painted them too. Then I painted on a face and threw my hands up in surrender!

See the cracked and folded fondant? yuck. Not quite as yucky as that snaky vine though, haha!

The assembly and decorating of that cake was all done on Monday night, which left me ONE night (Tuesday) to bake and decorate a cake for my work's potluck on Wednesday. I'd been planning on a 3 tiered cake; 9", 7", and a 6" pumpkin. After my failed pumpkin on Monday, I was not looking forward to trying again, especially since I'd be using more of the same fondant that was giving me trouble. But I persevered and baked my cakes, made the icing and started the assembly. One good thing about both these cakes is that I was using some filings I had frozen from when I made the cupcakes for the wedding cake tasting, so that was a little bit of a time saver.

I had a much easier time with this pumpkin, but didn't take any process shots.

The orange fondant actually worked pretty well this time, but another problem popped up. I decided to make a Swiss meringue buttercream since I thought I could get a sharper edge on the cakes. The problem was that when I tried to dye part of the icing orange, it would NOT turn bright orange! I swear I dumped 1/2 a small bottle of good orange food coloring into it and it just wouldn't go past pastel orange. I don't know what the deal was. I also couldn't get the yellow to turn a nice bright color, but that I could deal with a little better than a pastel orange. Anyway, I worked around it and just used the pastel orange as my crumb coat. In the end it worked out ok and I just added some candy corns to hide my cake seams. I ended up being pretty happy with it and everyone at work seemed happy as well. I guess that's enough complaining for tonight. If you made it all the way through, then thanks for reading and I hope you have a great night!