Halloween Candy-Filled Spiderweb Cake

Hello my Figgy Friends! I cannot think of a more perfect time for my first blog post than Halloween. It’s not only one of my favorite holidays all year, but it’s 100% my favorite holiday PERIOD for baking. There are so many fun ways to bake and decorate treats this season from spooky to whimsical to kid-friendly to just plain gross looking – but delicious tasting! I’ve done everything from colorful candy-covered cakes to zombie-brain-blood-oozing-knife-stabbing cupcakes. This year, I decided to take things in a different direction and create a sophisticated, white, webbed cake - perfect for any haunted castle shindig – with a bonus tasty surprise. In this post, I'll give you step by step instructions on how to make this cake and highlight 3 main techniques - how to cut and stack cakes to create the candy cavern, how to ice your cake to get a perfectly smooth/fondant-like finishing using buttercream, and how to create these marshmallow webs.

First up, bake your cakes. Any flavor will do. Since I was going for this bi-chromatic black and white scene, I opted for Devil's Food (muhahaha) with a vanilla American Buttercream.

I need to take a moment and give a shout out to Global Sugar Art for this buttercream. They have fa-bu-lous cake recipe and tutorials. What’s great about the buttercream I used for this recipe is that it’s a crusting buttercream. That means it will dry/crust after a few minutes in the fridge making it perfect for decorating and frosting beautifully smooth cakes. The shortening in this recipe is what makes it crust so feel free to swap out flavors, but keep that shortening in there! Go here right meow for the recipe: https://www.globalsugarart.com/chef-alan-s-buttercream.html

Once you bake your cakes, it’s time to cut and assemble. Depending on how tall you want your cakes, you can do this one of two ways. Either bake your cakes in two cake pans and slice the layers in half - like I am doing here.

Or you can bake the cake in four pans. Either way, you need to end up with at least four layers. Next you want to level out the cake to eliminate the dome that forms when it bakes.

This is where things start to get interesting…Using a round cutter, cut a hole and hollow out the middle of two of your cake layers. This will eventually become the hole to house all that candy goodness. The size of the hole will differ depending on what size cake you are making. Here I use a cocktail shaker (any circular cutter around your house will work) that has an opening approximately 3 inches in diameter for my 6inch cake. You can either cut the layers individually or cut them while stacked. I chose to stack my layers to ensure my cuts lined up exactly.

Now it’s time to stack your cake. Start with your first solid cake layer then add a layer of your buttercream.

Next, stack your first “holed” layer and again ice with buttercream. Then add your second “holed” layer ensuring the holes line up and your cake is even around the sides. Ice with buttercream.

Then comes the best part. Fill with CANDY! You can use any candy of your choosing. I decided to go with these adorable orange pumpkin marshmallow things. I loved the color, the classic Halloween symbolism, and the congruency of using marshmallow candy in a marshmallow-topped cake.