How to Make a Super Easy Zombie Cake

What’s better than birthday cake? Zombie birthday cake, obviously. I have few domestic talents, but this is a cake that even the most clueless chef can tackle with ease. Mistakes? No such thing. This zombie rises up out of a grave of chocolate cake, frosting, and crumbled cookies.

What you need:

• foil
• cardboard box
• Oreo cookies
• gummy worms
• black gel icing
• chocolate frosting
• a round chocolate cake (buy premade, or make from a box – recipes are for crazy people)
• a doll cake topper/pick, which can be found at a craft store or in the cake decorating section of some supermarkets
• gel food coloring (do not try to shortcut with regular liquid food colors)
• plastic eyeballs, spiders, or other creepy crawlies (optional)

What to do:

• bake or buy your cake
• line a cookie sheet with foil and put the cake on top
• hollow out a small space in the middle of the cake (or use a bundt pan as I did)
• frost – no points for neatness, sloppy is better
• smear some of the frosting thinly over the exposed foil to make mud/dirt
• put your cake topper in the middle of the cake
• cake toppers are generally naked, cover in frosting to create clothing
• smear green gel food coloring and some of the black frosting on the cake topper to create a zombie look
• separate the creme filling from the cookie shell of the Oreos and crush the remaining cookies
• arrange larger broken cookies in a circle around the zombie to suggest that she is rising from her grave
• sprinkle smaller cake and cookie crumbs around the cake and into the frosting on the foil
• adorn with gummy worms
• stick in eyeballs or other plastic creepy things for atmospheric effect
• cover a cardboard box in foil, and decorate to create a headstone (with happy birthday wishes) for your zombie’s grave

That’s it! It’s easy enough to do the same thing with cupcakes. We used mini bundt pans and small cake toppers for these little treats. To create small headstones, we used the creme filling leftover from the Oreos to frost mini-chocolate bars and then decorated with gel icing. No birthday for a while? There’s always Halloween. Ah, heck, who needs an excuse? These are good for the zombie geek any day of the year.