Lime and Coconut Halloween Slime Ghost Cake

Halloween baking is such fun - you can really push the boundaries of how you would normally decorate a cake, and make it as over the top as you like! Obviously subtle black and purple looks very stylish and striking but this Halloween I decided to go for..... green slime!

The theme for Food 'n' Flix this month is Ghostbusters - the 2016 remake which was chosen by host Coffee and Casseroles. I did enjoy the film and didn't think there was anything odd about an all-female cast - the film was funny, it carried on the ethos of the original Ghostbusters film and there were even several nods to the original - which I won't spoil if you haven't seen it, but you will have fun spotting the cameo roles to the extent that I'd worked out who Patty's uncle was (who she refers to a few times) long before he appears on screen!

My heart is loyal to the original Ghostbusters though (the first one anyway, not the sequel - which I don't remember being that bad but is largely panned). It came out when I was five years old so I don't imagine I would have seen it right away, but by the time it was shown on TV (in the days of only four channels, you had to wait a couple of years for new movies to appear on screen!) I would have been about seven or eight and was transfixed. I even used to run around the playground at primary school with a group of friends acting out Ghostbusters stories - though as one of the only girls I was always forced to be Janine. Though it could have been worse, the other girl played Slimer!

In terms of choosing a recipe for Food 'n' Flix, my mind turned straight away to the Stay Puffed Marshmallow man from the first movie... from the remake, one of the over-riding foodie references is to Chinese takeout - there's a standing joke about takeaway food that Abby (Melissa McCarthy) gets from a Chinese restaurant, and their HQ is above a Chinese restaurant.

But as it's Halloween I wanted to make something 'spooky' and not Chinese food. Slimer, the friendly green ghost, features in both the original movie and the remake, so I took him as my inspiration and decided to make a cake oozing with green 'slime' buttercream!

For the cake itself I used this recipe from RTE for Irish chef Rory O'Connell's toasted coconut and lime cake though I did change it a little. I didn't cover it with the toasted coconut and I didn't make the cream cheese filling and instead did a lime flavoured buttercream which I then added green food colouring to.

 

Despite being green the cake looks quite elegant like this... but I wasn't going to stop there!

 

On top of the cake there is more green buttercream, plus some green candy floss I bought in a tub from a shop called Tiger and some marshmallow ghosts and chocolate eyeballs, also from Tiger.

Does it look like Slimer has been at this cake?!

I'm sharing this with Food 'n' Flix and Cook Blog Share.

 



Halloween Cake Pops - Skulls and Ghosts

Halloween is definitely more fun if you have kids - or if you are in your 20s and want an excuse to dress in a sexy costume! This year I'm not doing anything for Halloween - I was going to carve a pumpkin but it's 5pm on October 31 and I haven't been to the supermarket yet!

 

I suddenly remembered a cake pop mould I bought in the Selfridges January sale and had put in a cupboard; I also had some offcuts of another cake in the freezer so I decided to make cake pops.

This mould is made of silicon and is designed so you can actually bake your cake mixture into the appropriate shapes, but I found you can also use it as a mould.

I mixed the crumbled cake with some buttercream until I had a dough-like consistency - I've written several posts before on how to make cake pops so won't explain in detail again.

I then pressed the mixture into the silicon mould, put both sides of the mould together and put it in the fridge for an hour to set.

The shapes came out of the mould very easily - there was a skull, a ghost, a pumpkin and a ball that you can decorate as an eyeball. I stuck the end of some cake pop sticks into some melted candy melts and put them into the cake balls and left them to set.

Unfortunately I hadn't left them quite long enough (or my dough was too soft - you can always pop them in the freezer if you are worried) because the pumpkins and eyeballs fell apart when I was dipping them into the candy melts (I was only making one or two of each as they were only for my fiancé and I - I don't get trick or treaters where I live!).

However, the skulls and ghost turned out really well and you can still see the detail of the shapes, eg the hollows of the skulls eyes.

I dipped them in melted white candy melts and left them to set, then used a brush and a little black food colouring to paint on the details.

For the final touch I stood them in these mini pumpkins, called 'munchkins' - I had to make a hole with a skewer first, then pushed the cake pop sticks in.

Last year I made ghost and Frankenstein cake pops, which you can see here.

The Food Year Linkup on Charlotte's Lively Kitchen is still open so I am sending her these Halloween cake pops.

 

I've also just got time to share this with Treat Petite hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat at the Baking Explorer, as their theme is black and orange.