In Case Of Zombies

As a longtime zombie lover and cake baker, I couldn't wait to combine my two favorite things. I bought the "In Case of Zombies" t-shirt a few years ago. A friend spotted the shirt and, being maybe a little too familiar with my love of zombies, suggested I buy it. Of course, I couldn't resist. This cake is one particular scene from the shirt (you can see in the upper right hand corner). The text for this scene says, "Show no mercy. She's not your mother anymore." It also reminds me a funny scene from the movie "Shaun of the Dead."

I baked a yellow butter cake using a recipe from CakeLove: How to Bake Cakes from Scratch by Warren Brown in two square 8x8x2" pans. It's a fairly dense cake with some distinguishing ingredients like potato starch (though I always substitute with corn starch because potato is a little hard to fine), half and half and brandy. The buttercream is a more haphazard combination of unsalted butter, confectioners sugar, a little bit of vanilla and milk. I baked the cake and made the frosting first, then set the cake in the freezer to make sure it would be nice and firm for my eager zombies.

I molded the zombies using Wilton's fondant. The colors were created using a variety of methods - the green is from a few drops of green food coloring massaged into the fondant, for the black I used edible food writers, gray was made basically using a combination of drops of food coloring until I had a nice battleship gray, then I only used a few drops on the fondant, and the flesh color combines yellow and a bit of gray. Getting my zombies to stand up on the cake was the most difficult part, and for that I used a number of toothpicks.

The cake came out well - very moist but maybe just a little sweeter than I normally like. It was a lot of fun to make and enjoy. I couldn't bring myself to eat the zombies, though. :-)