WANTED! Candy Corn! Dead or Alive!

The following is an excerpt from SugarBaby extolling my love of candy corn:

My favorite halloween costume was a death trap:  seven feet of chicken wire slathered in papier maché, festooned in flammable white, orange and yellow oil paint, made mobile with four shimmying grocery cart wheels, and equipped with a sticky trap door for candy deposits.  I was the envy of every kid at Woodmont Elementary.  I was the biggest candy corn on earth.


Sadly, there was no ventilation, it tipped whenever I tried to negotiate a curb, and the built-in mesh window was inches to low for my gangly frame.  But I was happy to withstand any discomfort for a giant candy corn, even if it wasn't edible.  Luckily, I usually got a few pounds of the real stuff deposited into the bucked attached precariously to the inside of the costume.  Today, I bypass trick-or-treating and death-trap costumes and simply make my favorite ghoulish treat at home and in any shape I desire.

I also love chocolate cake and nougat filling.

Put it all together and you better believe you'll be in a sugar coma for a week.  But I guarantee you'll be smiling!

Everything in this sweet cake can be found in SugarBaby.  The chocolate cake's on page 216.

The innards of my fudgey chocolate cake are filled with vanilla nougat, which you can find on page 120 of SugarBaby.

The ghostly veil is candy corn (page 66).

Here's how I put it all together.

For the cake insides, I take half the fudgey chocolate cake recipe .  I make a dozen cupcakes with the batter (they are baked for 15 to 20 minutes).

I then make half the vanilla nougat recipe while the cupcakes cool.

I level the tops of the cupcakes and put the tops aside.

level all of the cupcakes

 I take a melon or teaspoon cookie scoop and scoop the middle of each cup cake out.

scoop the innards of the cakes.  just enough to make a divet for the filling.

I then scoop nougat filling into the cake cavities!

I put one cupcake atop the other.  Smush them together gently.

I then take the small slice we leveled off from one of the cakes and trim it to size to fit on top of our little cake tower and then place it on top and gently smush again.  The cake is so moist, you'll find that everything adheres just fine.

and here's what it looks like sliced in half.  Yummy.

Make the candy corn recipe per the instructions in SugarBaby.  Divide the candy corn into three even pieces while the candy is still quite warm (this differs from the book instructions because we want to work with the stuff while it's still pliable and easily draped into ghostly shapes).

Keep one piece plain and die one piece orange and the other yellow.

Roll the plain piece into a foot long rope.

Divide the orange and yellow pieces and roll them all into foot long ropes. Put the orange pieces on either side of the plain rope and the yellow pieces on either side of the orange ropes.

Make sure there's a fine layer of either corn starch or confectioner's sugar on your table and lightly dust a rolling pin with the same.  Roll the ropes together into a 6" wide x 36" long strip.  Stamp out 6, 6" rounds.

 

Gently cover each cake with the 6 inch round of candy corn.  

Use a medium sized open pastry tip to cut out ghoulish eyes and a large pastry tip for the mouth.  

If you like, fill the spooky eye and mouth cavities with melted chocolate or leave them deeply vacant with the promise of the deadly sweetness within.