Halloween Party Cake and Cookies

Vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream 
and royal icing cobwebs


We're all adults in our house now that Bubby's all grown up, but that doesn't mean we love Halloween any less.  We love trick or treating in a nearby town that is very festive, but after several years of doing this it was beginning to feel very repetitive.  So, we decided to have a Halloween party.

We invited all of Bubby's friends and ended up with a group of about 12.  A nice fit for our house.  We decorated as best we could, although the windy forecast made it impossible to put up the inflatables and use the fire pit we bought for the occasion. But the inside of the house looked very festive.  Bubby and I were all decked out in witch and warlock costumes.  The party was a lot of fun!

We served chips and pretzels, lemonade and other juices, pasta with meatballs and salad. There was a jack o' lantern full of fun-size chocolate bars like Snickers, Twix, etc. And there were Halloween cookies and Halloween cake, and even gluten-free cupcakes.  

For the cake, I used Sugar and Sparrow's Vanilla Sheet Cake recipe.  I frosted it with chocolate American Buttercream, candy eyeballs, and royal icing cobwebs.  I piped the cobwebs the day before so they had time to dry. I tried to size them appropriately for the cake by outlining the perimeter of the cake on the bottom of a sheet of parchment, then piping the cobwebs in the top of the sheet.  I placed them on the cake right before the party, fearing the royal icing transfers would melt.  But since the buttercream had crusted, they were just sitting on top of the cake. It wasn't a problem for cutting though. It looked very cute.  I can never get my Halloween bakes to look scary!

For the cookies, I used my regular Martha Stewart sugar cookie recipe to make cut-out Ghost Cookies. These are easy to frost with royal icing, only needing to tint a small amount black for the ghosts' eyes and mouths.

Ghost cookies in their skull-shaped tray.


The cake was delicious and I was surprised that most of it was left over, Hardly any of the guests touched it!  The cookies, though, were a hit. People took them home and by the end of the party there were only a couple left. 

Note to self, with this crowd from Bubby's school, it's cookies and cupcakes!

How could you say no to this?!


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