A Holiday on Elm Street

This Really Couldn’t Have Gone Better

You know, I’m trying a lot of new things lately, and sometimes I end a seven hour day in the kitchen by weeping into a pile of my own crumbled leavings.

Not today, folks. Today, I made a cake bleed, and it was glorious.

My Instagram has already filled with holiday bakes (curse these influencers and pre-planned content!), but I wasn’t quite ready to leave Halloween behind. After rewatching A Nightmare on Elm Street I decided I wanted to make a Johnny Depp inspired cake. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, WITNESS THE MOVIE MAGIC! There is a seriously incredible amount of blood in that clip, but, honestly, it’s so fantastical that it shouldn’t scare you. I mean… Freddy Krueger turns Johnny Depp into a water feature. It’s honestly just incredible to read about how it was done.

Still with me? Well I didn’t figure out how to make a cake spray blood into the air (yet…), but I was tickled crimson when my husband plunged an unsuspecting knife into this cake and drew out a picture-perfect rivulet of blood. A rivulet that turned into a puddle and then a lake.

Tickled Blood Red

Despite using tons of food dye, I wasn’t able to get my Freddy Krueger reds and greens right for this cake, so I decided to embrace the season and give it a festive ruffle. Ruffles, as you may know, are a work in progress.

The cake may look holidazzle, but the smell and taste of burning leather really gave me Nightmare Before Christmas wreath meets Muppet’s Christmas Carol meets Fredrich Krueger’s Home for the Holidays (coming soon to Hallmark Channel).

The blood wasn’t very difficult to engineer, so you can rest assured I’ll be doing more blood pockets in the future. After all, doesn’t every slice deserve it’s own artery of delicious syrup?

I think so.

I also think it will be funny to see the look of betrayal in my husband’s eyes when I finally learn how to spray blood at him when he slices into a cake. I’ll call it a Veronica Cartwright Special.

Veronica Wants a Piece with a Rose on It, Obviously

Some recipes Are Just Born Bad

Making this cake was a reminder why I don’t often turn to American Cake as a cookbook. It has a few spectacular recipes in it, but overall the book cuts corners and gives downright wrong instructions. Such was the case with the burnt caramel syrup that went into this cake. I should have trusted my instincts and ignored the book’s instruction to STIR (!) CARAMEL (!) AS (!) IT’S (!) MELTING (sigh), but I followed the recipe and had the pleasure of making the syrup over with Bon Appetit’s instructions.

Angry at the syrup step, I rejected the rest of American Cake’s Burnt Leather cake recipe and used a base recipe from a professional baking book I own for a yellow cake. I also added the burnt syrup to a basic Italian Buttercream for the frosting.

The raspberry blood leftover from last week’s Viscera Velvet added a needed sweetness to the towering inferno. It was quite easy to make a dam of buttercream in the middle of the layers to hold the liquid, although I did watch it anxiously for a few hours, confident the cake would bleed before it was sliced. It did not.

Overall… it was a lot of bitter sugar. The flavor was helped a lot whenever you got a particularly blood-soaked bite, a phrase not uncommon in our home.