Next Wednesday is Halloween, so I’ve been baking all kinds spooky things lately! I recently whipped up this ghostly cake for Food Network’s website, and it’s been one of my favorite projects this season. The process of building the cake was so much fun and it’s not difficult to put together. If a two-tier cake seems daunting, the recipe can be baked into a single nine-inch 4 layer cake.

To get started, you’ll need to break out the neon food colors for the vivid cake layers!

Be sure to buy an extra carton of eggs for this cake, because the recipe requires 10 egg whites. The resulting white cake batter is the perfect pale base that allows food color to show through brilliantly. The black cake batter is partly achieved by using dark cocoa powder, and by adding cocoa that means you don’t have to use a ton of black food color – only a little bit.

The baked layers will need to be leveled because the tops of the cake will crown beautifully (mental note: make this batter into cupcakes!). A bit of black confectioners’ buttercream holds everything together.

As written, the recipe makes a two-tier cake, 8 inches on the bottom and 5 on top. If you’d like to make this cake a single tier, you may use 9-inch cake pans, and any leftover batter could be made into cupcakes.

Holy smokes! The marshmallow web technique is crazy-stretchy fun! And messy! My advice for this part of the decorating is to just just have fun and be at peace with the mess. That’s kind of my baking mantra anyway, and I might as well have it copyrighted: “Be at Peace with the Mess ©“.

I first saw the marshmallow web technique on The Cake Blog in 2012, and since then it’s really taken off! I think every cake baker should try it at least once, just to appreciate how cool and wild working with melted marshmallow can be.

The ghosts are made of white buttercream. They have little black sugar pearl eyes and some of them have confetti sprinkle mouths. Each one seemed to have their own personality.

Would you ever suspect an eye-popping interior hides behind all of this black-and-white? The cake-cutting reveal is a big part of this cake’s charm.

You can find the recipe, AND an instructional video on FoodNetwork.com, at the following links:

Marshmallow Web Ghost Cake on FoodNetwork.com

Or, view the video on FaceBook!

Happy (almost) Halloween! xo-h