Morbid chocolate skull cakes

Look out Mofo! I'm joining the party (albeit, two days late and it looks like everyone has been having a whole lot of fun already) but I'm ready to rock! November started with a nasty stomach bug, chez nous, so I wasn't keen on the idea of cooking, eating or blogging. Having said that, even though I was off my food, I wasn't off the idea of baking cakes ... especially chocolate cakes ... especially chocolate cakes with skulls on!

 

Morbid chocolate skull cakes

(chocolate cake mix taken from Charlotte O'Leary's Chocolate Brownies)

Cake ingredients
170g/6oz self-raising flour
salt
2 tbsp cocoa powder
170g/6oz caster sugar
5 tbsp sunflower oil, plus extra for greasing
230ml/8fl oz sweetened soya milk
1 tsp vanilla extract

Skulls ingedients
1 cup icing sugar
~1 tbsp water

Chocolate topping
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 cup icing sugar
~2 tbsp water

Method

• Pre-heat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.
• Oil a 20cm/8in square cake tin with some of the sunflower oil. Look at the shape of your tin and decide how many cakes your going to cut. Mine is rectsangular so I made fifteen (5 across, 3 down).
• In a bowl sift together the flour, salt, cocoa powder and sugar.
• Add the oil, soya milk and vanilla extract, and mix carefully together until completely mixed.
• Pour into the tin, and bake for about 25 minutes, until the brownies spring back when gently pressed.
• Whilst the cakes are cooking, mix up the skulls icing. I used about a tablespoon of cold water with half a cup of icing sugar. Once that was mixed into a paste, I added the other half a cup of icing sugar and mashed it all together with a spoon until it formed into a ball. If you don't get a ball forming, add more water or icing sugar until you get there. It doesn't matter if you make too much icing because you can add cocoa and more water to it to make the chocolate topping.
• Divide the icing ball into little balls the size of large marbles. Count out as many as you are going to need and set aside any leftover icing.
• Press the balls flat into ovals onto a piece of grease proof paper. 
• Cut across each oval about 1/4 of the way up and pull the two pieces apart from each other a bit. This separates the jaws from the skulls.
• Using a chop stick, make all the eye and nose holes.
• Using a fork, mark out the teeth. I used sugar strands for some of the teeth but then gave up because it was too fiddly to do with a toddler in one arm! 
• Mix up your chocolaate icing using leftover skulls mix if you have it.It should be thick but spreadable.
• When the cake is ready, Take it out and leave it to cool for five minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.
• Cut into squarish pieces and place them in muffin cases. Leave to cool completely before covering with chocolate icing.
• By this time the skulls should have hardened enough for you to carefully lift them off and place one onto each cake.

Happy Halloween!