Halloween Party Cake

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Woman's Home Companion Magazine 1942

"Show 'em what a grand cake maker you are.  Serve this cake and hear compliments.  Look and tastes wonderful, yet it's easy to make---just follow recipe exactly and use Spry to be sure of best results."

For our Weeny Witch Halloween Party I made a fun vintage inspired "party" cake suggested by Aunt Jenny and Spry shortening. 

I am sure Aunt Jenny is going to be disappointed because I took the shortcut and used a prefab boxed carrot cake mix.  She had me dirtying up all the mixing bowls and pots I own with honey, shortening, and melting chocolate along with making a marshmallow boiled frosting.  No thanks, that's a sticky gooey mess I would prefer to skip!

The key feature of this cake are those cute little "decorations' as they are called in the recipe.  They are suppose to be the simplest part because they are just pre-made chocolate covered vanilla creme candies.  I see these"old -timey" things all the time on shelves of stores getting dusty and past their expiration date.  I guess some shift managers started to notice them too because there were none to be found in town.  I decided to make my own versions with homemade cake pops coated in melted chocolate.  I saved back the cake bubble I cut off the bottom of the cake, crumbled it and mixed it with a little bit of pre-fab tub icing that was shoved way back in the fridge collecting cobwebs.  I then shaped the little domed heads and froze them.  I then speared their necks onto sticks and dipped them into hot melted chocolate chips and placed them back in the fridge to firm up.  Sounds all very torturous for the happy little guys.

I decided I wanted to try out concocting a homemade cream cheese frosting for this cake.  That didn't go so well.  Maybe it was because I used fat free cream cheese?  I looked up the recipe in an old cookbook and it called for cream cheese, milk, and powdered sugar.  It never firmed up as a frosting and kinda reminded me of oobleck...but it tasted pretty good!