I LOVE October! For one – I love the weather. Two – it’s Halloween! Three – it’s the month of my husband’s birthday! We had a low-key celebration this weekend, with his favorite meal, but no cake. A birthday without cake is an abomination to me. Since he’s so busy these days, we decided to postpone the cake for another couple of months when he will hopefully have some breathing space. That’s two whole months for me to plan his cake! That couldn’t possibly end well, could it? I guess we’ll find out. BUT, that doesn’t mean our house was cake-free this weekend though. 🙂
I’ve got some adorable (and scary?) Mini Monster Cakes (Halloween Cakes) for you guys today, which I think are PERFECT for kids’ Halloween celebrations, or any type of fun kids’ event. There are 5 monster cake ideas here. Each one has variations in color, shape, piping patterns and decorations. So please feel free to mix and match these styles to create your own version of fun and colorful monster cakes! So you only want to make multiple cakes of the design? No problem. Want to make different designs? Go for it! These are basic cake recipes and recipe ideas, so go ahead and have some fun with ’em. 🙂
The Cake I’m using my recipe for chocolate sheet cakes here. These cakes were made with black cocoa to color them naturally in black. BUT you can also use dutch cocoa for the cakes and then use a little black coloring to color them darker. These mini monster cakes (Halloween cakes) are dense, fudgy, super moist and insanely delicious. You could try making monster cupcakes instead, but I wanted to make something larger, plus I wanted to use the cake scraps to create “cake pop dough” to mold the dome-shaped surfaces on top.
Yellow spiked mini monster cake with buttercream “spikes” The Frosting This is my favorite fluffy vanilla buttercream frosting. I add a little extra powdered sugar because I wanted the frosting to keep the piped shape. The frosting was divided into 5 and then brightly colored with orange, yellow, blue, purple and teal. You can use any color or color combinations you like, but make sure to use GEL COLORS. You need quite a bit of coloring to get these deep colors, so if you use regular food coloring, you may need more of it, which would end up softening the frosting further. But with gel coloring, you use far less, and you end up with a more vibrant color as well. I especially like the purple monster as it was inspired by the evil minions from the Despicable Me movies, complete with purple candy floss (cotton candy) for his wild unruly hair! 🙂 My frosting recipe here yield roughly about 1.5 – 2 cups of frosting per color (that’s 7.5 – 8 cups total yield). You can create the monsters with single colors OR place two colors in each piping bag to create a dual color effect (see the teal mini monster and the blue dragon mini monster cakes).
Teal furry mini monster inspired by Sully from Monsters Inc. Decorations I used the following tips to get the fur or scaly look on these mini monster cakes (Halloween cakes). Small grass tip 233 Big grass tip 234 Russian grass tip (identical to tip 234, just with more holes), for the fur and hair Round tip 2A or 1A Popsicle stick to create the “scales” Open star tip 18 for the long “spikes” Basket weave tip 48 for the raggedy fur Eyes – I got the small and medium-sized eyes from a cake decorating store (they are actually medium, and large sized candy eyes). But you can make your own by melting white and black candy wafers and piping out the eyes. The large eyes that were used were made with white gum paste (or fondant) with black gum paste stuck to the middle. These were attached to toothpicks (for extra stability), and dried for a day before being used. The tongue, nose and horns – it’s easier to make the nose with black gum paste. The horns were made with grey gum paste and the tongue with red gum paste. Rather than buying colored gum paste, I usually use white gum paste and then color it. Teeth – The teeth were made with gum paste as well, but fondant will also do. Make sure to make them thick so that they’ll still be visible after piping the “fur” buttercream. Purple monster hair – I used the grass tip to create hair for one of the monsters, but wanted the purple monster to have finer hair, so that it would look more like the purple minion. Cotton Candy was PERFECT! The wispy cotton candy can be shaped and piled on top of the cakes to create unruly monster hair. Just be mindful that cotton candy is 100% sugar, and it melts quickly. So I would recommend keeping the cakes in the fridge, without the cotton candy, until you’re ready to serve them. Then just before serving, you can add the cotton candy on top. Optional effect – I used my air brush gun to spray the “dragon” monster with some silver luster paint plus purple color to give it some luster/shine.
Purple minion monster cake with purple candy floss hair
Dragon inspired blue scaled mini monster Serving Suggestions These aren’t necessarily meant to be spooky, but more fun and adorable for a kids’ Halloween party (or even a birthday party!).
Ragged furry pet mini monster! If you’d like to have your kids involved in the decorating, you could simply present them the crumb coated cakes, and then let them decorate them however they like. You can serve the cakes with an assortment of frosting colors and tips, plus decorations, fondant and gum paste to make their own mini monster cakes (Halloween cakes)! 🙂 Just make sure you don’t let them handle toothpicks, unless they are old enough to do so. The mini monster cakes are super delicious and fudgy and I’m sure will be an absolute hit with kids! STEP BY STEP RECIPE VIDEO – Please watch this for details on how the cakes were decorated More photos of the cakes, so you can see the some of the finer details.
