Only 3 days until Halloween! Normally it’s not a holiday that excites me very much, but last year I made this super fun Marshmallow Madness cake and decided that crazy Halloween cakes needed to become a yearly tradition. This Green Ghoul cake has been brewing in my head since last Halloween when I tried to watch The Conjuring and made it about 4 minutes in until I got too scared and had to switch to Ghostbusters. I’m an 80’s kid, so when I think of ghosts I automatically think of green and slime.
Whenever I make a cake with lots of components to it, I like to do so over a period of a few days. The first day I made the meringues. Even though they are pretty simple, they take a while to bake and I like to let them dry out in a warm oven overnight. The cake, which I made on the second day, is almost exactly the same recipe as my Pink Almond Party Cake but minus the pink and the almond. The third day was for making the frosting and green slime drip and assembling the cake.
I’m glad I set aside an entire evening for the frosting, because it took me a couple of tries. I learned the hard way that making black frosting is a lot easier when you start with a chocolate base. My first attempt turned out to be a murky shade of gray. For the second batch, I used a really easy recipe for a whipped chocolate buttercream, but I used black cocoa powder instead of the regular stuff. Black cocoa powder (sometimes called black onyx cocoa) is heavily Dutched, has a strong flavor, and will make your frosting taste like an oreo cookie. If you don’t have any, you can use regular Dutch-process cocoa, but you may need to add some extra black food coloring to get the right shade.
