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by Barbara Jo
At this point Barbara May came home from a party and helped me move the cake to its final location so I could attach the intestine, which was to be trailing out of the rib cage so as to suggest that the person to whom the thorax had belonged had been ripped apart, rather than carefully dissected.
I bent the jelly roll (which I was quite proud of; I'd never made that kind of cake before and I sometimes have problems with whipping eggs. Fortunately, I was visiting my mom recently and she told me that it's very important the mixer and bowl be very clean and perfectly dry or the egg whipping won't work, so I didn't have any problems at all this time. Thanks, Mom!) into appropriate curves and covered it with white chocolate. I was, by this point, out of both kinds of frosting, lacked the ingredients to make more, and it was four o'clock in the morning so I couldn't get any more. That's why I just used plain white chocolate to cover the intestine. It looked fine, but was pretty difficult to paint, again because I lacked cocoa butter and so couldn't use the powdered food colors.
All that was left was to add the buttercream frosting blood, so it wouldn't look so pristine.
I did little veins on the organs first with a piping bag, then put big globs of gore on the ribs with a knife. A little spritz of corn syrup to give it that all-important oozing, wet look and I was done!
Tragically, the next day was very hot and, as white chocolate melts at about 95 degrees Farenheit, this caused major structural failure of the rib cage. By the time our guests arrived for Pumpkinfest, the rib cage had collapsed almost completely. It was nice and stable in the middle of the night when it was cool, though, I swear! So we put a photo of it in its original state up on the computer monitor. Actually, even with the rib cage broken, it looked pretty gruesome and neat, but it was better before. As I mentioned before, the cutting of the cake was not as dramatic as I had hoped, but, considering that I make all this up as I go along, I think the whole project didn't go too badly at all. And everyone said the cakes and sauces were all delicious, despite the excessive amounts of frosting required for this sort of project.
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