I made this cake for Halloween. It’s a skeleton coming out of a grave. VERY SCARY!!!

I got this cake idea from a Wilton Yearkbook.

The skeleton is made from a popcorn/corn syrup mixture. I used the pumpkin cake pan from Wilton to shape the skull, I shaped the arms and hands by hand. I used lollipop sticks to give the arm strength. The facial features are made from royal icing.

The skeleton is sitting on a sheet cake with chocolate icing. Oreo cookie crumbs make the dirt, and green buttercream is used for the grass.

This cake served ~25-30.

I made this cake several years ago for my husband. He LOVES monkeys!

The monkeys are made from royal icing. They are holding yellow candles for bananas, with yellow royal icing around to look like banana peels. The lion, elephant, giraffe, and zebra are plastic toys from Wilton. I put the party hats on them using royal icing (to match the monkey hats). The cake that the animals are standing around is two Oreo cookies iced with a candle on top. To make the trees, I piped leaf-shaped royal icing over the round muffin pan to form the canopy-leaf shape. Once they dried, I attached them to the top of pretzel sticks. Those are gumballs beneath the leaf canopy. I used needle and thread to attach the gumballs to the tree.

The royal icing parts must be done well in advance, because it takes a long time for this much royal icing (the monkeys) to dry. I would say at least 2 weeks in advance.

I got this idea from a Wilton yearbook; their instructions said to attach the gumballs with royal icing, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that work! Please respond if you’ve used that method successfully, I’d love to know how!

This cake served ~20.