Song of Death

This is my third year entering Threadcakes, i seem to be drawn to the skull designs as i made a skull cake a couple of years ago aswell.
I decided i wanted the cake to look dramatic inside aswell, red would have been my first choice but i didn't have enough colour so had to settle for purple.
The cake i choose to make is madeira as its one of my favourites and also good for carving. I made six 7in cakes seemed like a lot of cake for one skull but i didn't want to run out.
I decided i wanted white chocolate ganache for the filling but didn't realise it would be so yellow looking when made , my friend suggested i use superwhite to make it whiter and it worked a treat, i stacked the layers of cake with ganache filling in each.
Then i started carving, this is one of my favourite things to do, there was a lot of leftovers so i plan to make cake pops next weekend for halloween,
When i was happy with the shape i covered the outside in ganache then covered the skull in sugarpaste and left it to crust over, meanwhile i covered the board with white sugarpaste and started to make the music notes. The circle part is just 2 balls of modelling paste and i had to make a template for the top part, i cut the shape out of modelling paste used cocktail sticks to support the upright part and left to dry overnight,
The next day i painted the music notes black they needed a couple of coats to cover up the red, the reason i didn't make them black to begin with is it uses up so much colour and looks just as effective when painted and you've used a fraction of the colour.
The hardest part of this was the mouth and teeth, i added modelling paste and used modelling tools to shape the mouth then i made all the teeth separately and added them to the gums, it took three attempts before i was happy with how they looked. I stuck the music notes on with modelling chocolate and used a fine paintbrush and hand painted the lines and shading on the skull, the pooling on the board was a last minute decision as i thought the whole cake looked too white, i had made black royal icing to use for the drips and as i let it drip i thought maybe i should try a pool of icing on the board, i just piped a random outline for the splodge and added a few drips here and there, i flooded inside my outline with the royal icing (the same way you make a run-out) and put it under a lamp to give it a nice sheen. i'm delighted with how it turned out and really sets off the skull.
My daughter was looking forward to having some purple cake and she loved the white chocolate ganache, I brought the rest of the cake into work and although i work in a bakery they were all happy to eat the cake.
Thanks to my work friends for posing for the photo and thanks to my cakey friends for the ganache advice and photographic advice/tweaking