Dual Tone Spooky Cakes: Quick Halloween Idea

This bundt cake looks a little a ghost.

I used to make rainbow cupcakes when I was a kid, similar to these.  We would get bowls of cake mix and dye them colors and make a big mess, but they'd turn out cute anyway.  I was reminded of this the other day when I surfing the web and saw a black and orange cake.  The author made black cakeballs and put them in the middle of a cake pan.  She then covered the balls with batter and baked it.  It made very neat circles in her cake.  Mine are more random, but I think they look sort of oozy and spooky.

This is a simple half/half dual tone cupcake

For these, I separate my cake batter and dye each part a different a color, but you could use separate cake batters too.  In the cupcake, I dyed one half of a vanilla cake batter orange and the other half black.  For the bundt cake, I used one of those "12 cupcake" devil's food mixes for the black, and a whole white cake mix separated in half.  I dyed one half green and the other half orange.  The cupcakes require a little finer hand.  You spoon one color into your cupcake pan, then put the next color down.  You can swirl them if you want.  If you use a piping bag, you can get intricate layers by piping a small amount in the middle of your paper cups and piping the same amount of the next color on top of that layer and repeating (that works well with rainbow cupcakes).

The cake is a lot easier, even if you want to make intricate layers, but it's the same concept.  You can do as many layers as you want, or just make one black spot in the middle, etc.  This would be a fun activity for kids.  The rainbow ones are awesome for Easter.

The icing for the cupcakes was just a can of icing dyed orange.  For the bundt, a regular icing wouldn't be drippy enough.  I made a glaze and dyed it in two colors.  Here's the recipe for the glaze.

Check out that owl platter. Isn't it adorable? I love Halloween.

Bundt Glaze:
4 ounces softened cream cheese
1 to 2 tablespoons milk
2 cups powdered sugar

1. Blend all the ingredients together in a food processor, mixer or blender.  I normally start out with 1 tablespoon of milk and add to my desired consistency.
2. If the glaze is too thin, add more sugar.  If it's too thick, add more milk.

Once you blend it, you can separate it, dye it your colors and drip it on in whatever pattern you want.  You have to wait until your cake is cooled or it will all melt off and not look pretty at all.