This project involved making six mini-cakes, themed around a festival… so my excuse is that it’s Samhain/Halloween, you know, the night when the barriers between life and death are at their thinnest, and the dead rise from their graves. So yeah, my cakes are ghouls rising from the ground.

Inside is fruit cake, all the rest is made from sugar paste and food colourings.

And here they are individually:

Anyone guess who this guy’s inspired by?

This one’s inspiration is a little more tricky:

And the inspiration for this one is pretty obscure (unless you’re a fan of a certain strand of zombie movies… ):

These last three were all a bit more ad-libbed. I’m particularly proud of this chap’s cranial occurence:

Palatable?

And finally, a grasping zombish hand (cos we had to do at least 2 different shapes for this project).

Dr J Russell sent me this link to a blog entry entitle Console Cakes!, where the blogger has rounded up a load of pictures of cakes shaped and iced – with varying degrees of skill, to varying degrees of success – to look like games consoles, and even a few arcade cabinets. The best one is probably this Nintendo Wii:

Which was bloggged about over here. I do not approve of things like “Use Betty Crocker yellow cake mix” (when you’re this inventive, why not make a cake mixture properly?), but the results are certainly fun.

The first blogger also provides a link to here. A much higher standard of icing-craft here, with some fab Mario-themed cupcakes, and better still an elaborate Katamari cake.

The unique, distinctive Katamari games have inspired all sorts of craftiness – costumes, knitted items, soft toys, and hybrids of the above, but the baking is rather funky – and edible (ish, food colourings are by and large thoroughly nasty things. I found some of them even carryied health warnings about the potential detrimental effects of their E-numbers when I was looking into doing coloured icings for a cake course).

I am slightly disconcerted to find myself linking to blogs on Sanriotown, the Hello Kitty official site, though.