BOO cake for Halloween

Beat the soft butter with sugar, salt and vanilla for two to three minutes until fluffy. Slowly add the whisked egg and then fold in the flour just briefly, until no dry flour is visible.

Divide the dough into two halves and knead the cocoa into one of them. Flatten both doughs, wrap them in cling film and put them in the fridge for about an hour.

You need 110 g of dough for each base. Place a piece of light and a piece of dark dough on top of each other, cut the stack and press it back together until you like the marbling. Please don't knead it, or everything will turn brown!

Roll the dough out 5 mm thick on baking paper. Use 5 mm cutting harp strips on the left and right so the thickness is even everywhere.

Print the word «BOO» so that it is 28 cm long and 13 cm high. Place a transparent sheet on top and trace the letters with a foil pen.

Lay the sheet on the rolled-out dough and run a toothpick along the lines. This presses the letters finely into the dough.

Remove the sheet and cut along the lines with a small, sharp knife. Don't forget the holes in the two Os! Carefully pull the dough away all around. You can use the leftovers straight away for our Halloween biscuits with a chocolate coating.

Repeat the process for the second base.

Bake both bases on the baking paper for 12 minutes at 190 °C fan oven. Let them cool completely on the tray: while warm, the letters are still soft and break easily.

Whip the 200 g heavy cream until stiff and chill it briefly.

Stir the mascarpone with the sugar until smooth. Add the lemon juice, lemon zest and the vanilla cream powder and mix everything well. Finally, gently fold in the whipped cream so the cream stays nice and airy.

Put some of the cream into a piping bag and pipe the cavities of the silicone mold full with pumpkin, skull and spider shapes. Smooth the surface with the angled spatula and place the mold in the freezer for 20 minutes.

For 9 cavities you need about 50 g of cream. For our cake we made 36 figures, so either 4 molds at once or four rounds in a row.

Carefully press the frozen figures out of the mold onto baking paper and keep them cold until assembly.

Add the 30 g of heavy cream to the remaining cream and briefly whisk it with the whisk. This makes it a little firmer and perfect for the dots on the inside and on top. Fill it into a piping bag with a round piping nozzle.

Place the first sponge layer on a cake board and pipe dots over all the letters, close together.

Set the frozen figures around the edge, faces outward. Fill the jam into a piping bag or a cornet and drizzle it over the dots inside, so it looks like blood. If it peeks out a little at the edges, all the better!

Spread a thin layer of cream over it so everything is level, then carefully place the second sponge layer on top.

Now pipe dots onto the top layer as well, again over all the letters. Hold the piping nozzle upright and pull it straight up, so the dots get a little tip and look like ghosts.

Fill a cornet with slightly tempered dark couverture and pipe three small elongated dots onto each dot: two eyes and a mouth. And there you have a whole gang of ghosts on your cake. Done!

For our photos we added some decorative fake blood with a brush at the end. You don't need it for the cake itself.