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by Barbara Jo
And we finally start the cake! Yes, it really did require that much cake. We used a recipe from The Joy of Cooking for a very yummy sour cream/ chocolate chip cake. Red food coloring swirled in the batter gave it a delicious-looking bloody brain color. Any light-colored cake would work as well.
This is Barbara Jo straining the fresh raspberry sauce which will be used for blood. This is great over cake or ice cream, even if your dessert doesn't bleed. Puree 1 pint of raspberries, 3 tablespoons of sugar, and 2 teaspoons of lemon juice in a food processor. Then strain the mixture through a fine sieve to remove the seeds.
Ok, we've skipped a few steps here (clearly). This is the completed base of the cake. There are 5 layers of cake here, frosted with a chocolate ganache, which is made by melting semisweet chocolate with cream, and if you like (and why wouldn't you?) flavored with liqueur. Because it's so tall, we had to use interior supports, or the whole thing would have just toppled over. Barbara Jo cut a circle of foam core and stacked it between the middle layers. It's supported below with wooden dowels pushed into the cake, trimmed to just below the level of the layer. Of course, it was a little more complicated than that, since the plumbing system also had to be installed. You can see the large pastry bag to the right of the head, which is filled with whole lot of raspberry syrup. The bag is attached to a plastic tube, which curves behind the cake and enters in the back. Inside the cake, there's plumbing to send the syrup to outlets behind both eyes and the mouth. The outlets are blocked with frosting to prevent premature ejaculation, so to speak.
Once the base of the cake was completed, Barbara Jo started sculpting the facial features out of modeling chocolate, which is semisweet chocolate melted with corn syrup. Once chilled, it's very easy to work with and pretty tasty.
This is the completed face, with all the modeling chocolate details.
These are hard candy eyeballs, which were made by pouring out hot candy (sugar, water, corn syrup, and coloring) and pushing it into icky globs as it cools. Orville's right eye is already covered with a candy eye, so when the blood is pushed through, it'll fill up behind the eye before spilling out.
Orville's left eye has fallen out, so the other candy eyeball is just placed on the base. The blood details are done with royal icing.
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